


Chains Adventurous - Adventures In Time And Space

by nvzblgrrl



Series: Chains Adventurous [5]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Jumpchain
Genre: Jumpchain - Freeform, Self-Insert, almost, check the series for the updated versions, give me a few chapters, under rewrite, update on updated version: It's almost completely caught up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-09-03 08:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 62,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8705668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nvzblgrrl/pseuds/nvzblgrrl
Summary: Time Travel, spacemen, aliens, and possibly the most annoying of all possible incarnations of that inimitable meddler, the Doctor. Somehow, I wasn't all that surprised. Part of the Chains Adventurous series. Self-insert, a Jumpchain story. Warnings for violence and language.





	1. Chapter 1

**8:38 PM, Christmas Eve, 2006**

* * *

An American might have called it a 'war room'. Prime Minister Harriet Jones preferred the term 'command centre', because while violence certainly wasn't out of the question if it came down to it, she'd rather end this Christmas without bloodshed, regardless of how badly President Winters and his slimy VP wanted to be responsible for cocking up Earth's first official 'first contact'.

UNIT analysts and other workers – both under government employ and part of the space program responsible for the Guinevere-1 probe – were buzzing about the room, pouring over every scrap of data available. For all that brainpower focused towards a single goal, the sum total of what they had was a nigh-untranslatable transmission and a countdown clock of five hours.

Her cellphone buzzed in her pocket, breaking through her pensive tension. She had it up to her ear before the first 'ring' ended.

"Harriet Jones, Prime Minister."

"I know who you are," the caller said curtly, cutting her off before she could ask who they were and how they got this number, "They're called the Sycorax."

Harriet Jones almost blinked. "Excuse me?"

"The aliens are called the Sycorax," the caller repeated slowly, enunciating each syllable of the name – Harriet Jones heard it as 'Sigh-Coh-Racks' – as one might correct child's faulty pronunciation, "The blood, muscle, and bone look is rather distinctive. Almost said Faction Paradox, but no. They wouldn't be nearly so overt, even if they still existed in this timeline. So, process of elimination; you're dealing with the Sycorax."

Harriet pulled the phone away from her ear, looking over to Major Blake. "We have some information," she announced before returning to her mystery caller. "I'm putting you on speaker. What do these 'Sycorax' want?"

"Everything."

The unfamiliar, casually gravelly voice almost echoed in the fresh silence, though the pause they gave to let that sink in was short-lived before the faintly acidic cut of their voice returned.

"They want your land, your minerals, your precious stones," they continued, "Every _possible_ resource that could be squeezed from this rock; be it water, oil, or blood, they want. If your translation software is running yet, you might notice that 'human' might be being translated as 'cattle'. That isn't an error. To them, mankind is cattle and fit for all that implies."

Some of the aides looked sick at this declaration and, had Harriet Jones never encountered the Slitheen or certain human politicians, she might have been amoung their number. The information was still sobering, deflating any lingering hope that this would be an easily resolved situation.

"They'll ask for half the population of the planet as slaves, while holding a third as hostages," the caller said briskly, as if this was merely a lecture hall and every horrified listener a student who should really be taking notes, "They will likely not shy away from a fight, not when they have the upper hand and superior technology level it takes to become a sustainable slave-based space empire – they do have a preference for melee weaponry, take note of that –, but your complete and total surrender would make their lives infinitely _easier_."

"How are they going to take a third of the world hostage?" Llewellyn asked, a faint haze over his eyes. It was no great surprise; the man's view of the universe had been shaken by the casual confirmation of alien life, the fact that said alien life was apparently malevolent certainly didn't help matters.

"Blood control. Form of hypnotism, you could say. Not sure about the exact mechanics and it's not terribly common as far as I understand, but it is effective… to a point. Have all the Type-As started climbing to the tops of things yet?"

"The what?" Major Blake asked, "How do you know this?"

"I have approximate knowledge of many things. The blood sample you sent into space on your ill-fated probe. Genevieve. Guinevere. Whatever. It was Type-A. Bit like handing over the keys, but it's not like you could have _known_."

Harriet Jones didn't care for the edge in the words, like there was some greater, unspoken danger lurking just behind the Sycorax that could have well been handed the keys as well. Was it a reference to the Slitheen or some other hidden party waiting to play their hand? It was bad enough that this stranger was had her personal phone number, but the tension carried across by sound alone was not helping the situation.

"The Sycorax will not be playing nice. They have little to no predilection against violence or murder and I doubt if their 'word of honor' extends beyond their own species, but you have a few things in your favor. First, their blood control isn't nearly as powerful as they sell it as."

"And the other?" Harriet Jones asked. She didn't know what this 'blood control' was, but it was something the Sycorax had, something they were relying on as their primary weapon. If their Samaritan was giving them that information, it was something worth taking note on.

"The Earth is defended… and just not by the likes of UNIT and Torchwood. I recommend giving Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart a call. He might be able to keep your Code Nine in line, though you might want to kick that up a digit…"

With that, their mystery caller hung up, leaving an empty tone to drone through the room.

"Well, that was enlightening, if not cryptic and somewhat disturbing," Major Blake decided, "Casual namedropping, spilling state secrets, information UNIT doesn't even have…"

"We should be thankful that they're on our side, whoever they may be," Harriet Jones said before moving to hand her phone over to an assistant. "That doesn't mean we shouldn't find out who our Good Samaritan is, however. See if you can trace the call back to its source."

* * *

**8:45 PM**

* * *

I sighed as I collapsed against the inside of the Whitehall kiosk next to the payphone I'd just hung up.

Five minute conversation on payphone?

30 pence.

Hacking records to find Harriet Jones' personal mobile number?

Child's play.

Sharing information that could help save the world?

Priceless.

I wasn't new to this, the meddling and the usurping of the 'expected' chain of events, but the information I had was old and, even though my brain and the memories contained within had long since become the sort that could withstand millennia without stain, I'd not given Series Two of the Doctor Who revival much in the way of attention. I'd watched it, sure, but I hadn't exactly been riveted.

But my antipathy towards Rose Tyler had finally bit me in the ass, because while I had vague ideas of what happened in about half the episodes – I remember being especially annoyed with Tooth and Claw and being maybe the _least_ upset about School Reunion –, I hadn't been able to give much beyond an 'ugh what's on fire now' level of attention to the content.

I banged my head against the side of the kiosk, rattling the glass. Dumb shit. Dumb shit. Oh my god, what dumb shit.

But what I did know was that I had to keep Ten from fucking over Harriet Jones. Even if it came up to kicking him in the head and dragging him away by his fucking sideburns.

There was an odd symmetry to the action; I was a Monk of History, at least of a few universes ago. Still was, I supposed, among a few dozen other descriptors. Asgardian, human, ranger, detective, thief, spy, librarian, wizard, scientist, Jedi, Pokémon trainer… those barely summed up what I had been and what I could be again.

Alright, enough of thinking and internal exposition, I scolded myself as I pushed myself back upright. Business to attend to, interception to run. Set a Monk of History to catch a Time Lord. Set a trickster to chase off aliens.

I closed the red door of the phone kiosk behind me, the one that in another universe might have been the visitor's entrance to the Ministry of Magic, and started walking down the street. The wind was good and brisk, the kind of cold that woke me up just as well as a cup of coffee.

Not like I had anything better to do this Christmas.

* * *

**?:? ? ?**

* * *

The Doctor dreamed.

This was uncommon immediately after a regeneration. Usually it was just a coma, completely lacking in any sort of mental stimulation as his new body figured out its new configurations and specifications. Sometimes the dreams were just the memories tangling with the forebodings and then shambling back to their proper locations again once the dance was done.

But this was a proper dream, part of him still conscious enough to question these sort of things noted. Originality tangling with misplaced memories of places and people into a mess of metaphor.

What, exactly, his Fifth incarnation was doing playing American basketball or his Sixth waiting in line for the bunny slope was supposed to represent, he wasn't entirely sure, but at least they looked like they were having some kind of fun in this nonsense landscape.

His hands tightened around the wheel of the imaginary car he was driving slowly through the canals of Venice.

An Oldsmobile, American and backwards again, but a much later – and, if he was being honest, much squarer and boring-er – model than the one he'd taken Susan, Barbara, and Ian on a road trip across what might have been half of the United States in. Also, this one was TARDIS blue compared to the glittering purple paint-job of that one.

Maybe that was a metaphor as well. The TARDIS was kind of boring and blue and outdated from the view of his own people, but made up for all of those complaints in personality. A TARDIS-blue American Oldsmobile named 'Clara'… well, it was pretty much the human version of that.

Why his subconscious mind said 'I need a human version of that' in the first place didn't come up.

His Fourth walked by, his usual fedora traded out for a titanic sombrero which was in turn crowned by a clunky and unsubtle set of night-vision goggles with at a minimum five bright green lenses. Seemingly unconcerned with the fact that he was up to his thigh in water – rather low for a Venice canal, the Doctor noted absently –, he leaned over and knocked on the window. Just a rather simple knock with four strikes, no different than many people did it, but something about it seemed important.

Knock, knock, knock, knock.

Initial thoughts of 'oh no' and 'uuuuugh' processed and dismissed in under five seconds, the Doctor finally lowered the window.

"Hellooo," the scarf-Lord intoned as he leaned his face down to the gap.

"Yeah, hi," the Doctor said.

The Doctor checked his wrist – no watch, pity –, the canal ahead of him, which was empty apart from all the wet stuff, and then the car radio, which was apparently broken, because all the display said was ?:?. He looked back at his Fourth.

"What's this about then?" he asked.

"This conversation, this situation, or this simulation?" the Fourth asked in turn before casting a wide-eyed glance across the scene and leaning conspiratorially… or at least as far as the five inch space between car door and car window would afford, "Or are you asking about the regeneration?"

"Yes, yes, yes, and yes! All yes, all the questions," the Doctor said snappishly before touching his chin. It had settled into a clear shape, hadn't it? No longer the waxy, papery texture that made him think of the Watcher. "Is this going to be one of the snappy ones? I'm not sure if I like that."

"Who knows?" the Fourth said, even as he tapped his own nose. "Shouldn't we focus on the first four questions then rather than add more to the pile? You'll figure you out later, Number Ele–"

"Ten. It's Number Ten. Revolution Nine… I mean, Regeneration number Nine. New teeth. Nnnyuck."

"Impervious in London, could be a difficult thing," the Fourth said in an almost commiserating tone before vocally signaling the switching of tracks, "Anyway, lying about your age, hanging around young women, that _hair_ … midlife crisis much?"

The Doctor was regretting lowering the window now. "The answers to the questions?"

"Ah. Philosophy, frogs, wú, and forty-two. Respectively and respectfully, of course."

With that, the Fourth continued along his way, apparently into deeper waters as more and more of him disappeared under the water with each step, until the very tip of his sombrero disappeared from sight near the end of the 'street' with barely a ripple.

The Doctor might have stared after him longer if a large and particularly bulbous amphibian hadn't flopped onto the hood of the car with a mighty 'SMACK'.

So rather than stare after his vanished Fourth, the Doctor stared at the frog.

The frog stared back, before blinking one eye, then the other and – almost abrupt in the sudden snap of action – snagging a small fly out of the air. The Doctor could have sworn he heard the words 'heeelp meeeeeeeeee' coming from some very small, very invisible voice that was suddenly cut off by the frog swallowing.

The frog belched.

The Doctor wasn't aware frogs could belch.

He stared at the frog for a little while more before it tired of the silence and hopped off, possible for more interesting conversation with a caiman or an axolotl.

Well, the Doctor thought after a moment in the relative comfort of the car called 'Clara', that happened.

And then the dream shook and he fell through the bottom of the car.

* * *

**3:11 AM, Christmas, 2006**

* * *

The Sycorax ship was a hideous thing, even under the glow of a cat's grin moon. A natural conclusion when one retrofits an asteroid, but their additions did little to improve the natural looks of it. Parts of the stone had been crudely carved, allowing for portholes and docking bays, where other areas were dedicated to less practical displays of intelligent design. Long metal spikes and high technical chains that served as nothing but intimidation display and declaration of purpose were strewn intermittently over the ship, as if added carelessly as afterthought.

For all I knew or cared, it was exactly that.

I glanced at the transmission I was intercepting. While I didn't have the benefit of video with this cheap phone I'd picked up and 'upgraded', I didn't need any visual cues to interpret the exchange. What it did give me, however, was a readout of all present energy bands along this line of transmission.

Including one that was behaving in ways… most atypical. Certainly not natural.

Harriet Jones was about to be transmatted aboard. The Doctor would be there himself at some point, via the TARDIS. I would have to make my own way. Easy enough, even if the caveat of 'without attracting attention' still stood.

Ideally, I'd directly piggyback the transmat signal, but I wasn't familiar with this universe's method. If I was closer to the target, I might have chanced it and gone off of the odds of a teleporter snagging a little something extra, but from the scaffold surrounding Big Ben? The action would be patently reckless. Too many chances to splinch the others going through.

Splinch. Hm.

I eyed the Sycorax ship appraisingly. Alright, direct Apparation was out of the question, since I didn't have a clear Destination and there was no way to divine one without an idea of the layout of that intergalactic beast. But if I followed Harriet Jones' signal, thus locating a landing spot…

Stealth after that point?

I grinned as I shifted my anatomy from Asgardian to Twili as easily as someone would put on a mask, the appearance of a human alien replaced with pallid green skin, pointed ears, and luminous red-orange eyes. Oh, pure simplicity.

* * *

Teleportation was a surprisingly painless form of travel, Harriet Jones noted, not entirely unlike an elevator. Save for the part where there had been no warning of what was about to commence and the fact that their destination was the belly of the beast, so to speak, it seemed perfectly safe. There was a small, nearly silent 'crack', but if that was the nature of noise on this ship, the teleport, or something else, she didn't know.

As the beam of light faded and the dark innards of the Sycorax ship became all too clear, Harriet Jones straightened her shoulders, ignoring the weapons being rattled by the fearsome faces all around. She was the representative of Earth and Prime Minister of Britain. She would not cower in the face of the unknown or the likes of the Sycorax. Even if she did wish the Doctor was here to help, she would perform her duty with all the dignity she had.

A Sycorax stepped forward, rattling a saber that looked like it had once been half of a man's leg before being forcibly mated with a blade. Words of a rough, guttural language ripped out of its raw lips as it gestured down a dark tunnel-cum-hallway.

"That would be our cue to go down the hall," Alex said after a moment of consulting the translator UNIT had given them, "the 'Great Slayer and Master of Shackles' awaits."

"Charming," Harriet replied, even as their small party began to walk down the rust-colored hall under the gaze of a thousand different skulls and ten thousand fists hammering on the walls. "I haven't been treated to this much pointless pomp and circumstance since I visited the American President."

The hallway ended abruptly, giving way to a veritable cathedral of stone, bones, and what Harriet Jones hoped was red meteorite stone. The ceiling was high and skull-masked faces seemed to peer down from the walls themselves, as if the arrival of the Prime Minister and her mismatched entourage was the opening to some grand opera and they had box seats.

"What I wouldn't give to have the Doctor here…" she murmured.

"Why do you need the Doctor when you have me?" a voice whispered. It was the same one from the call. Before Harriet could react, the voice tutted quietly, "Don't react. Any of you. They can't see me and I'd rather you lot not call any attention to that discrepancy."

"What is your plan?" Major Blake asked without any visible hesitation.

"Right now? Observe. Hide. Keep you alive. Destroy them all if it comes down to it," the voice said, "I've no great love for slavers, so I'm liable to make it a complete and total curb stomp should events come to that end. Trust in that if you don't trust me directly."

"Can we not appeal –" Llewellyn began.

"To what? Empathy? Honor? Articles of war? Christmas spirit? They're alien slavers, the only honor they're liable to give is to those who can spank them in a fight, they don't consider you any better than cattle, and I'm fairly certain the baby Jesus wouldn't mean much beyond _dinner_ where they're concerned, because the words 'tender and mild' only bring a roast to mind."

The man quavered slightly and the voice relented, losing its harsh edge as the imprint of a hand came to rest on his shoulder. Out of the corner of her eye, Harriet Jones could almost see the hand itself, long-fingered and pale mint green where the shadows permitted color to be seen.

"You have a commendable outlook, Llewellyn, to look for the nobler traits in others so different from yourself. I'd rather it be showered upon parties that would not kill you for it. And don't blame yourself for them getting that blood sample. They could have run into any of the other probes. Voyager. Pioneer."

"I don't imagine the Voyager Golden Record or the Pioneer Plaques would have given them the ability to take over a third of the population," the scientist muttered.

"That record features brainwave recordings. If anything, that would seem like a more likely latchkey than a simple vial of blood," their unseen helper muttered before apparently refocusing on the now. "Alright. Stay close together. Prime Minister Jones takes the lead, the rest of you are secondary. They only need her alive, and if you annoy them, they'll _extinguish_ you."

"And you?" Harriet asked as the apparent leader of the Sycorax stepped forward. He was minutely taller, but the cast of his robes was different than that of his underlings. More bones, she finally realized. Teeth and finger bones braided together with some sort of stiff red-black thread.

There was a hiss of breath that Harriet couldn't help but associate with bared teeth.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," they murmured before there was a displacement of air and, at least in Harriet Jones' mind, no more half-comforting presence at their backs.

Still, she doubted that their shadowy Samaritan was gone. If they had been the one to place that call earlier – and Harriet Jones suspected that quite strongly – they could have ended their involvement then, rather than following them into the belly of the beast. And there was always the chance of the Doctor… No, it wouldn't do to rely on a maybe, even of that maybe was their best chance of survival.

Harriet Jones stepped forward.

"Harriet Jones, Prime Minister."

The Sycorax leader growled and spat, before turning on his heel and walking up to a console with a large luminous red button on it. It hardly looked like anything good.

He gestured to it, before once more spitting out more of his guttural language.

"Yes, we know who you are," Alex read off of the translator. "Surrender or they will die."

"And in the event of that surrender, do I have any guarantee that you will not kill them anyway?" she asked, "What is your word worth to 'cattle'?"

The Sycorax stared at her, yellow eyes considering before it murmured something.

"So you aren't completely stupid," Alex read before adding, "His words, Prime Minister, not mine."

"It would be a very sorry state for Earth to be in if I was," Harriet said before focusing her attention fully back on the Sycorax, "And if I do surrender, how would that be better?"

The Sycorax twisted his sword beneath his arm and gestured as he spoke his incomprehensible tongue.

"Half of your world sold into slavery or one third dies," Alex read with only the slightest tremor of hesitation. He glanced up, catching Harriet's eye before he finished weakly, "Your choice."

* * *

**?:?, ?, ? ?**

* * *

The Doctor crashed to ground and, for a moment, dreamt he was awake.

But no. If he was awake, the TARDIS console room would be in coral, not… well, whatever this was. Stained glass, arched metal buttresses, and scattered rugs of oriental make defined the space without regard to symmetry or color theme; it was like if his Eighth's console theme and his Sixth's coat decided to breed.

He sat up and looked around. While it clearly wasn't real – if it was real, it would have doors – it felt realer than the last section of the dream, because he could feel his headache from his bout of consciousness with the Pilot Fish.

At least nothing felt like it was collapsing.

He turned around to look at more of the doorless domed room and jumped back from the masked figure that had been sitting behind him.

The mask was blank, a white face with an empty smile and empty eyes, and the blaze of purple-black hair that burst up around it was almost a slap in the face in contrast. It wasn't human, for all it dressed and looked like one. There was no pulse in its waxy pale neck, never mind that it was too thin to be a living example of the species. Then, it was something else.

"Who are you?" the Doctor asked.

It tilted its head to the side, a playful presumption at confusion. "Who are you?" it parroted right back at him, its voice a fracture of noise that the Doctor's brain almost parsed as silence.

"I'm still working that bit out. But you… you're not supposed to be in my head," the Doctor said, pulling back from the thing a bit more. Psychic invasion was the last thing he needed right now, with his psyche the tender, barely healed over, pink-y thing that really shouldn't be poked around for a day at least…

"You're smaller than you seem to think are, little toad," the invader said, the fragments of stained glass that it called a voice rattling in a laugh. "I'm just here to tell you something."

"And what is that?"

It leaned forward, empty eyes staring deep into the Doctor's, drawing him in like black holes.

"You are not alone," the thing said, each word with the weight of worlds, before it stood up on spindly legs. "The manifold challenger is here. At your back or at your throat; now that is your choice."

"What? What is that supposed to mean?" the Doctor asked as something drew him back to the floor, the entire structure beginning to buckle under his feet.  
The masked thing pulled out a porcelain tea set and balanced it on nothing, the entire tray just sitting as if left on an invisible table. "It means it's time for tea."

The smell of hot tea filled his senses, the floor shattered, and the Doctor fell again.

This time, it ended with actual pain, flaring not just in his head, but in the rest of his body. Regeneration energy still at work, buzzing about the business of… well, pretty much nothing besides bleeding off as various bits of him convinced it that, yes, everything that needed doing was done, thank you very much.

He was in the real TARDIS, in a body that was very much real, and wearing very real pajamas and an equally real dressing gown that had a slightly odd habit of turning up fruit in its pockets. Oddly enough, the smell of tea was very real as well. Someone – Mickey, he really wanted to say Mickey – had spilled it into the lower workings of the console, where it had hit one of the hotter elements and…

Evaporated, releasing the tannins into the air like a make-shift humidifier, thus getting the proper amounts into his body to stabilize the regenerative process.

The Doctor grinned. "That's lucky."

Now if there wasn't some tickling at the base of his brain that said he was forgetting something…

* * *

Somewhere between 'the Yellow Girl has the Clever Blue Box so she speaks for your planet', the nonsense that spilled forth from Rose Tyler's mouth immediately after that, and the not-inconsequential fact that weapons were being held to the necks of those I'd sworn to protect, something in my head snapped.

My temper, likely.

"Not so," I said from the shadows near the ceiling, careful to keep my tone level. No screaming, no shouting, just flat displeasure that just so happened to carry. "Just because she comes out of the box doesn't make her a deus ex machina. Or deus ex machinam, if you're particular about your Latin."

The Sycorax leader jerked back, eyes searching for where I might be hiding. "Who speaks? Who speaks for the humans?"

"Follow my voice; we'll try your manhood here. I speak and hear all, bone biter," I called down before twisting out of the way of his line of sight as he snarled wordlessly. "You don't care for the name? I'll give you more. Nail nibbler, backstabber, oath breaker, honorless hound, powerless pecker who prefers to prowl on peasants rather than parties who can protect themselves from his predations."

"Speak again, trickster, but within striking distance!"

"Have these shadows offended? Perhaps I will ply you with other names," I said as I slid down the wall, becoming one with the shadows of his men. "Scared-Of-Shadows, Unworthy-To-Chew-On-Chicken-Shit. He-Who-Fears-Death-And-Lives-In-Dishonor."

The Sycorax set to muttering at this particular slight, even as their leader whirled around again. "You call me coward? I am not the one who hides in the dark!"

"'Hides in the dark'?" I asked from directly behind him, still not visible in the gloom, "I **AM** THE DARK! I AM ALL AROUND YOU!"

He swung his whip around, trying to catch me.

Well then. Wish granted.

I wrapped the whip around my arm, feeling the electricity course uselessly though my body. I met the Sycorax leader's yellow eyes and grinned, even as the wild flame bright hair of my Twili form frilled up in a crackling cloud.

It would be a pain to smooth out later, but for now, it was all part of the show.

"I've been lead to believe your people enjoy trial by combat. I also understand that your language doesn't make a discrimination between 'argue' and 'fight'," I said, tugging him closer by the whip he was so desperately trying to pull back. Purple lightning lanced around my arm, dancing across the black and green of my skin like flames.

In perfect honesty, it tickled.

I twisted my grip and pulsed a current through, feeling the main battery struggle and then fail to contain the sheer voltage I was pouring into it. It exploded in the alien's hand, burning through flesh and bone as exploded batteries were wont to do, even as the rest of the whip fell apart in my hands.

The Sycorax barely screamed, though he did clutch at his ruined hand. To all of the humans present, I might have seemed the very image of a demon and I wasn't exactly in the mood to disabuse the notion.

"So…" I said, savoring the stretch as I cracked my knuckles, "let's _argue_."

"Is violence really the best option here?"

The mood shattered as everyone turned to look at the latest interruption.

Spiky hedgehog hair. Walking around in pajamas and a fucking bathrobe. Body language screams 'I'm an arrogant prick but an endearing one so you'll love me' unconvincingly… or maybe that was just my dislike of Ten coloring the reality of a freshly regenerated madman with a blue box.

"I'm just asking… oh!"

Who was currently looking at everything like it was all wrapped up in shiny paper and tinsel, rather than bones and highly likely blood. And then he noticed Rose Tyler and positively magnetized himself to her side.

"Rose, we need pancake mix. The TARDIS has no pancake mix."

Yep, definitely the Doctor.

"What?" she asked. Really, it was the only appropriate response besides 'yeah, okay'.

"I had a really strange dream. Mr. Burns had a pancake monopoly, which is odd, because he's a fictional character and one traditionally in the energy business, not pancakes. But another part was that the TARDIS had no pancake mix, which is real, despite being in the dream."

"Is that all?"  
"Well, no, there was some other stuff in the dream, lots actually, but that was the most important thing. I think," he took a moment to look thoughtful, "Dreams are awful things. So crazy when they happen, so quick to fade from memory. I do remember running into myself a lot. They were all very unhelpful."

I sighed. "Care to negotiate terms with the Sycorax then, Doctor?"

"Can I catch up first? I've been out of sorts for the last…"

Ugh. Am I ever as annoying as this… I had a feeling the answer is yes. It's less annoying when I do it. "Yah, do ya thing. We can wait."

He positively beamed. "Ah, fantast- fanfas. Fnnnt. Great, these teeth can't even say fnfsic. I'm going to need something new to say."

"Fantabulous."

"No, something away from the F's."

I tuned the conversation out. Was my 'patron' expecting me to be a companion to this guy? Literally any other incarnation would have been better…

Okay, probably not the First, because I'm nothing if not annoying myself. But any number other than him and Ten, I could have maybe survived. But no, I had to get thrown in with Ten. And if I didn't become a companion, odds were I'd have to contend with Torchwood and their 'kill everything not us' tactics.

Joy.

I rolled my eyes as the Doctor started complaining about his new face's lack of ginger hair.

I would have taken the Trial of a Time Lord over this. You don't get to be over ten thousand years old in a career of troublemaking without getting some idea how to argue your charges. Could have gotten at least half of the bullshit leveled against Six dropped, maybe. Time Lords were tricky. Not to mention not above manipulating evidence and sticking their heads in the sand where the Matrix was involved…

"If I might interrupt," the Sycorax leader snarled, "who exactly are you?"

"Well, that is the question of the day, isn't it?" the Doctor said with an earnest grin.

"I demand to know who you are!"

"I DON'T KNOW!" the Doctor snarled back, setting everyone scuttling back a few steps. His angry expression quickly dissolved into one of mild annoyance. "Oh, lovely. Rude, not ginger, _and_ bipolar. This regeneration is starting to look like a real winner. Anyway, in the event you haven't been paying attention, my name is the Doctor. You _might_ have heard of me."

The Sycorax stepped back.

"Exactly _what_ you heard is up in the air, but I am known. Mostly for trouble, saving the day, ruining evil plans, bold and occasionally questionable fashion choices," the Doctor continued. "But names are one thing. Now, _who_ I am, what my personality is… well, it's all unknown right now. Untested. Throw something at it, see if it sticks," he said, shrugging as he started meandering around, "Am I… funny? Am I sarcastic? Sexy?"

I rolled my eyes as he winked and clicked his tongue in Rose's direction.

"Am I all mood and misery? The life and soul of the party? Left-handed, right-handed? A gambler, a fighter, a coward, a traitor, a liar, a nervous wreck? I mean the fact that I'm making this speech gives away that I've certainly got the gob, but beyond that…? I could be anything, really, but the question you should be asking… is what I think of this," he said before pointing up the stairs towards the console that held the big red button of doom.

Oh, I knew where this was going, and so did the rest of the room, consciously or not.

"I mean, it's big, it's red, it's threatening. Everything about it screams 'do not press under any circumstances what so ever'. Honestly, it's every Saturday morning doomsday device and a few real ones besides. Doctor Claw would be proud of this design."

He stepped back to admire it for a moment, seemingly uncaring of all the eyes trained on him. He ducked down, fumbling around the innards before his spiky head shot back up, along with a hand slightly slick with something red and sticky. "And it runs on… blood. Huh."

The Doctor sniffed his finger. "Human, definitely."

And then he licked it. Every human drew back a little, not in fear this time, but disgust.

"Type-A positive," he declared with all the certainty of a sommelier before skewing up his face and wiping his hand off on a wall as his mouth busied itself with the difficult action of scraping off his tongue. "Major overabundance of iron, yeck. _Someone_ needs to cut back on the red meat."

"But blood control… blood control! Haven't seen that in years! You're controlling all the A-positives." The Doctor's delighted tone had dropped abruptly and he was staring coolly at the Sycorax leader.

"Yes, Doctor, we were well aware," Harriet said.

The alien hissed in response.

"Really? Usually I'm the first one being brilliant in the room. Who spoiled the fun?"

"One of our experts identified the race, control method, and motive of the Sycorax over five hours before their arrival," she said, "They also recommended we stand by for you."

The hissing of the Sycorax intensified.

"Oh, that's wonderful. Was it Ace?" the Doctor asked before holding up his hands to stave off any possible answer, "No, no, don't tell me. I'll puzzle it out later. Love a good mystery, me. Almost as much as I love a big red threatening button."

He took a moment to look at the button he was talking about before finally saying, as brightly as a reckless teenager might say 'I'm gonna do the thing', "Which is _probably_ why I'm going to push it."

"No!" Harriet Jones cried before she whispered, "you killed them."

The Doctor shook his head. "Tell me, tall, dark, and veiny, did any humans die just now?"

"We allowed them to live –" the Sycorax attempted to say before the Doctor interrupted.

"No, no, no. It's the control matrix, I just cut the release. Y'see, blood control… it's tricky, sure, but it has certain limitations. Kind of like hypnosis, but for a couple of things. Need a blood sample, for one, besides the technical specs which the Sycorax happen to have, but that's off the point," he said, holding up a hand for silence.

"Blood control cannot override the basic instincts," he continued, "Like… for say… the one that makes you step away from high ledges without even thinking about it. So your threat was… bupkis. Bupkis, is that an actual word…?"

I couldn't miss Harriet's sigh of relief, even as the Doctor started muttering to himself if casual use of Yiddish was going to be this model's 'thing'.

"Blood control is only one form of conquest," the Sycorax leader declared, "If I summon the rest of the armada…"

" _Please._ You've got no guarantee that the other tribes will want anything to do with you," the Doctor said, "How would they react to you asking for their help conquering a tiny little dust ball that doesn't even have proper interplanetary flight? Forget your honor. Forget your respect in the 'community'. They'd be badmouthing you all over the newsletters, not being able to conquer a few billion apes. No offense, humans."

"None taken," Rose Tyler said.

"Some, actually," Mickey added quietly.

"Besides that little problem, I have another question; why? I mean they've just gotten started as a species, they're no threat to you. These human beings… consider their potential… from the day they arrive on the planet and blinking, step into the sun –"

"I swear to fuck, if you're cribbing the Lion King…" I growled, feeling my frame begin to dissolve into shadow on account of irritation alone.

The Doctor blinked. "Ah. That was the Circle of Life. Good film but off the point." He refocused, pointing a finger at the leader of the Sycorax. "The point is this; leave them alone!"  
"Or what?" the Sycorax said.

"Or death," I said. All eyes turned to fix on me and I pulled on the memories of the majestic before continuing, "Even if you survive me or the Doctor – truly, you're far more likely in the second case –, the humans aren't powerless either. And I can tell you this; humans are crazy. They are the sort of beings that, even with their legs cut out from under them, they will still crawl at you to choke the life out of you. Kill a few and while you might sow fear among the masses, just as many will step forward with nothing but your complete and total annihilation on their mind."

I made a show of looking around the innards of the Sycorax ship.

"And, just looking around me now, they will probably succeed. And trust me on this fact; few mourn the death of a slaver. So, as we were discussing before the Doctor interrupted…" I grinned, revealing a mouthful of pointed fangs, "a duel. Who will you face in combat? The Doctor…"

I gestured at the Time Lord, who straightened up slightly, though posture didn't do much to improve the image of a scrawny spiky haired humanoid alien in rumpled pajamas.

"…or me?"

Me, the demon who had already done damage, who didn't play by the rules of physical flesh or this alien which may or may not be the trickster who upturns worlds with wit alone.

In the end, between those two options, I wasn't terribly surprised by the choice the Sycorax made.


	2. Chapter 2

**6:45 AM, Christmas, 2006**

* * *

 

"Sword?" I asked, offering the Doctor a relatively plain, single-edged blade I'd drawn from my personal 'shadow realm pocket'. While I was certain that handing the Doctor the Sword of Gryffindor would have generated a certain amount of squee, the fact that the sword had some element of basilisk venom to it would probably render it inadmissible for a proper duel.

The preparation for said duel was extensive, as the Sycorax went over every possible area where it could go, rituals layered with prayer being passed around like a twisted game of cultist telephone. It did little to comfort the humans, between the mystery of the actions performed and the sheer stretch of the wait.

However, the Doctor hardly seemed bothered.

"No, I think they'll give me a lender. Wouldn't want to insult them by using different hand standard," he said before giving me a surprised look, apparently finally processing that I was a green and black, flame-haired and elfin-eared creature of flesh and shadow. "Might want a conversation after though. Never seen one of you before…"

"Your funeral. Figuratively speaking, of course," I said as I allowed the sword to disintegrate back into shadowy pixels and watched his attention turn on that fresh puzzle. "And you'll never see one such as I ever again, I imagine."

At least not in this universe.

"With that hair, I'd hope not. Would be enough to give a Time Lord a complex, living in a universe full of manes like that."

I folded my arms as I leaned against one of the inner walls of the Sycorax ship. "Still upset about not being ginger?"

"Yes. I halfway had it a couple of times, but no. Can't ever get a proper solid shade of red." He frowned at a dark brown lock that was hanging down over his face before trying to blow it into some other position. "Brown. Bah."

How many times had I expressed that same sentiment when I was younger, back when I was limited to one body with that exact color hair? I shrugged. "Dye it if it bothers you so much then. But later, since I believe you have a duel to attend."

The Sycorax leader had chosen himself, even though the hand I had burnt earlier was still clearly injured.

Well, if they were as combat focused a culture as one would surmise from the homonym of 'fight' and 'argue' in their language, he would be the best fighter on hand, even with his hand half sizzled. It had recovered somewhat from the battery explosion, so I presumed they were a fast recovering species. Not fast enough for the injury to be gone, even three hours after it occurred, however, merely mended enough for the hand to be usable.

"His left hand is injured from earlier," I murmured to the Doctor as he passed by me to the dueling area, "Feel free to take advantage of that, if you find that you are a pragmatic man."

"Cheating? Wouldn't be cricket."

"Good. Because this isn't a game."

With one last searching look before he turned away, walking over to take up his position and turned over the two-handed longsword given to him in his hands before bowing to his opponent.

The Sycorax leader growled, not nearly so sincere in the performance of pre-duel niceties.

I strode smoothly to stand near the other humans. Nervous energy positively thrummed among the small party and I could understand. The fate of the planet rested on this match, no takebacks, no second chances, no interference.

"You have confidence that he will win?" Harriet Jones asked me.

"He is the Doctor; the odds are ever in his favor," I said coolly, waiting for the fight to properly begin. "Past incarnations have held the necessary swords skill to secure victory, I can only presume he hasn't lost it over the intervening centuries."

"Oh, so you've met him?" Rose Tyler asked.

I made a point not to clench my hands. Only a human, not even a 'bad' one. Merely a frustrating one. "I have witnessed a fair few of his escapades," I said smoothly.

"Oh, really? Daleks?"

Oh, so she wanted to play _this_ game. "Hordes of them. Also Cybermen. Zygons. Autons."

"Dummies that walk, the Gelth, the Jagafess!" she listed off triumphantly.

The duel had begun, but it was slow and clumsy between the Doctor trying to get a handle on the dimensions of his weapon and his opponent trying to feel out weak points. Once it started for real, the clash of steel would demand the conversation end.

"Those would be the Autons I previously mentioned. Also, Zarbi, Macras, Quarks, Krotons, Chumblies, Silurians, Axons, Ogrons, Draconians, and Sontarans."

Over ten thousand years after being inundated with Rose Tyler focused content every time I even looked sideways at the Doctor Who fandom and I finally got a chance at some form of revenge on the source. Getting back at a hapless blonde was never so delightful.

And, best of all, if she kept going with this little 'contest', I was now planning to sing Six's personalized Major General song, _just_ to be annoying.

"Slitheen?" Rose asked.

Aw, she'd petered out. Pity. My singing voice was not what one would call 'inspiring', unless the inspiration was to leaving the immediate area.

Speaking of which, the Doctor's duel was beginning to migrate as the Time Lord retreated from his opponent's onslaught. The crowd shifted, following the clash of steel through a side hall and out onto the surface of the asteroid.

"Blathereen as well," I said, though at Harriet's curious glance I clarified, "Same species as the Slitheen, different family. Infinitely more pleasant overall. Do avoid the Slitheen-Blathereen branch though. They favor the nastier side of their family tree."

What little lighting the Sycorax had installed in their ship was nothing compared to the dark of a night only illuminated by a sliver of moon. Still, that was enough to set the scene; the contours of rough rock barely made out by silver glow, the flash of steel occasionally flashing star bright as the blades managed to catch the right angle of light. Up this high, there was a fair wind and at night, it was only colder, whipping the warmth right out of your bones the moment it touched you. What it took away in comfort, it added in drama; sending the long loose robes of the Sycorax leader and the Doctor's simpler dressing gown flapping as they circled each other, waiting for the next opportunity to strike.

I wondered if the humans in the group could even appreciate this, what with their lack of proper night vision.

"They aren't so nice in the future…" Rose mumbled, reminding me that I had something else to do than appreciate the occasional cinematic moments my life afforded.

"Things change, Rose Tyler," I said, taking my focus away from the duel to pin her with a glare that must have glowed like a door into hell under the moonlight. "Nothing in this universe stands still for long. Planets come and go. Stars collapse. Matter disperses, coalesces, forms into other patterns, other worlds. Nothing can be eternal. Do try to get used to it."

The sharp rasp of steel brought my attention back to the fight. The Doctor was on the ground, all too close to the edge. His sword, I noted, was gone. Flung over the edge to possibly impale some unfortunate on the street below.

Unfortunate because though worthless piece of crap it might have been, it _was_ rather important to the proceedings.

Swish!

Aaand now his hand was off.

Not the clean swipe of the show either. Dark blood, almost black under moonlight, started to spill out steadily along with the odd gold spark. I watched the points of regeneration energy dance and then fizzle out, too unfocused to actually do anything. If I had to ascribe an emotion to the Doctor, based on his facial expression alone, it would have been something to the effect of 'so that's what that feels like. Huh.'

"You cut my hand off."

The words were whispered, but they carried in the silence. The Sycorax horde assumed that the battle was done, even as their leader stepped back to cry his victory.

"The Sycorax –!"

The words cut off as the Doctor rose, clutching at the stump of his arm. "Y'know what? I think I know what kind of man I am. A lucky one."

The Sycorax boggled. What sort of creature, removed of a rather important limb not a minute before, called itself lucky?

"Because… I'm a Time Lord within the first fifteen hours of my regeneration cycle. Which means I've got just enough residual regenerative energy to do this!"

He stretched out the stump of his arm and the golden sparks started jumping like popcorn, building out into new growth as they traced the lines of bones, ligaments, tendons, and then the flesh to cover them. It took less than a minute, but as the last sparks of gold flew off into the night like unseasonal fireflies, there was no mistaking the presence of the hand they'd left behind.

"Witchcraft," the Sycorax whispered.

Witchcraft, says a member of a species that regularly invokes curses and practices space voodoo, besides making use of Clark's Third Law to effectively do blood magic.

The Doctor wiggled his fingers, as if testing the quality of his generated limb. "Time Lord, actually."

I drew the saber of a nearby Sycorax from his scabbard smoothly, the alien only noticing as the tip flicked past his nose. "Care to rearm your champion, Rose Tyler?" I asked, holding the blade out where she could grab it safely.

"Rather looks like he did it himself," she murmured, though she quickly took it and threw it to him with a cry of 'Doctor!'.

He caught the sword easily and twisted it around in his hand, testing the weight. "Unfortunate for you… this feels like a fightin' hand."

With that cheesy line, the duel recommenced, with greater speed and ferocity than before. Five sweeping strikes, half of them striking sparks – how the Sycorax got anything done with such crappy swords was beyond me –, were exchanged before the Doctor managed to twist the Sycorax champion's blade around and slamming its hilt into his stomach, knocking him down on his back to hang halfway off of his own ship.

In short, this stage of the fight lasted less than a minute, where the first had dragged on, slow and plodding.

"I win," the Doctor said as he balanced the tip of the sword underneath his opponent's throat.

"Then end it," the Sycorax growled, "Kill me."

The Doctor didn't even hesitate. "No. I'll spare your life and you'll take this champion's command; leave this planet. Never return. Not with your brothers, not on your own, not with all the mercenaries you could ever hire. As far as you and your people are concerned, this is a forbidden place. What do you say?"

"Yes."

The Doctor pushed the blade further in, the point digging into the Sycorax's flesh. "Swear on the blood of your species and your line."

The Sycorax stared up at the Doctor. "I swear," he said slowly.

As if a switch went off, the Doctor withdrew the blade with a smile. "Ah, well then, thanks for that, big fella. Best bit of exercise I've had in weeks." He twisted the blade around and planted it in the stone before walking back towards us with a smile.

"You won!" Rose cried, running into his arms.

"That I did!" the Doctor said as he swung her around. He paused, putting her down as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tangerine. "And I have a satsuma. That friend of your mothers does like his snacks, doesn't he?"

I sighed, leaning against the wall. Chatter, chatter. I tuned out the speech about Christmas presents and satsumas, only reacting to the scream the Sycorax made as he fell. Backstabbing rarely panned out, but this was a particularly abrupt shift from a silly conversation to murder. It sat badly with me for some reason.

"No second chances," the Doctor's voice echoed back at me, cold and dark, as he reentered the ship. "I'm that sort of man."

* * *

 

The transmat was no different than any other form of teleport I'd used in the past, even if the bright light that accompanied it faintly sizzled at my Twili form's skin. The burn subsided as we landed on the dark London street below and I spared a glance to the Sycorax ship above.

It lifted away, engines thrumming in anticipation of leaving at higher speeds once they left the atmosphere. In the next ten minutes, they would be sent to a far more permanent remove just beyond the moon.

"Thank you for your help," Harriet Jones said.

I spared her a glance before turning my gaze back to the stars and the shrinking shape of the space ship above. "Wasn't much trouble. I've never cared for bullies."

"Neither have I," the Doctor said before smiling down at the small human at my side. "Prime Minister Harriet Jones."

"Doctor. My Doctor."

I looked at the Doctor and then over to Harriet Jones. "I'm sure you two require a moment," I murmured, stepping back, trying to maintain a level expression. The critical moment was imminent and dread was crawling around the inside of my chest. What would it cost to get in a Time Lord's way?

"Thank you."

I turned to look at Llewellyn. The balding scientist who would have died if not for my interference, in the end no more than another name on the list of collateral damage, standing in front of me, very much alive. "What for?"

"For… not being like them. You're evidence that… the universe isn't a cruel or lonely place. It isn't as ideal as I had hoped, but it…" he swallowed, as if trying to find the exact words he wanted to say, "It isn't as dark a place as it might have been."

I took a note to remember this, more so than anything else. This was an important memory, one that needed to be etched in crystal clarity.

"…thank you, Mister Llewellyn," I said slowly and carefully, for fear of shattering this crystal moment, "for proving that dreams of distant stars are not dead."

There was a moment of silence before I schooled my emotions.

"Well, I'm certain you have better things to do on Christmas than spend the wee hours of the morning in awkward conversation with a pointy-eared bastard," I said quickly, scratching the side of my face before making a vague 'shoo' gesture. "Go open presents, make merry… or whatever else you had planned for today."

Llewellyn nodded. "Yes, it's been a long night and I do not imagine Sian would forgive me for failing to open her present at the earliest opportunity. Five year olds are rather insistent on those sort of things."

He turned to Harriet Jones, giving a final salutation and a 'Merry Christmas, Prime Minister' before walking down the street and out of sight.

Well, even the threat of a Time Lord's revenge couldn't ruin that Christmas gift.

"Rose!"

Jackie Tyler had arrived, in full pink track-suit glory. I swear to god, the thing glowed in the dark, and I say that in full fondness for the woman.

"Jackie Tyler! Your tea restored me!" the Doctor crowed as the civilian mob converged into a group hug of monumental proportions.

"I told you! Didn't I tell you? All he needed was a good cup of tea –"

"Yes, mum, just like you said."

I turned away from the display and caught the eye of Harriet Jones, who beckoned me over.

Ah. So the time was now. "Yes, Prime Minster?"

"Do you think that the Sycorax would come back with the armada these ones spoke of?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said honestly, "I can only attest to what you have seen yourself. If you want to take the shot, do it. But the responsibility..."

"Falls directly on my shoulders, I know," Harriet Jones said, "I knew that the moment I called upon Torchwood. But if the Sycorax's word is as good as their leader's in the face of defeat, then I cannot take the risk of them coming back here again."

I bowed my head. "Then you have decided. I will step in if things get out of hand. And if anyone thinks you look tired… it's been a long night and you hope it will be a quiet Christmas. Do not get paranoid, even for a moment. Six words may have the power to topple empires but only if you let them."

There was a faint frown of confusion, as she tried to puzzle out my meaning, but it soon gave away to an otherwise grave expression. "Then we take the shot. Alex…"

"The Prime Minster has confirmed action," the aide relayed into his headset, "Fire at will."

I closed my eyes, but there was no escaping the fact that the sky turned bright sick green for a long moment that sent every piece of glass still intact from the Sycorax's arrival rattling.

The explosion that followed, even if I couldn't really 'feel' it from Earth, was rattling on another level. Every presence of life that had painted the ship aglow was extinguished almost instantly… but not quickly enough for them to die without screaming.

It wasn't a moment to be proud of. There was no glory in this. It was just the messy business of facts.

I shoved the thoughts away and opened my eyes to the Storm.

"That was murder," the Doctor said. He was cold again, not a proper ice storm, but his tone was chill enough to induce frostbite.

"That was defense," Harriet replied, "Adapted from salvaged alien technology. From a ship that fell to Earth ten years ago."

There was no pride in her voice, no defiance. Just an acceptance of the facts. On some level, she agreed with the Doctor's sentiment, but it wasn't murder. Underhanded, yes. A violation of the agreement, definitely.

But in the face of the facts, of the leader of the Sycorax who'd turned on his given word and honor the moment he had the chance to attack his foe from the back, it was the best option they had.

"They were leaving," the Doctor said, rage pulling at the lines of his face, but never quite crawling past the naked disgust in his voice. "They vowed never to return, as vowed to me by the ancient rights of combat. And you shot them in the back. Britain's Golden Age."

I braced myself and stepped between them.

"'By the ancient rights of combat'… do you think they'd adhere to that? Honor only counts among equals. They consider humans cattle. So you protected the pasture from the rustlers once. But you're a drifter, Doctor. The Earth cannot rely on you alone for its protection, because you're not always here."

I refused to look away, even as his eyes turned to burn holes through mine. I would not break before a fury that could tear down worlds.

"Don't pretend they don't have the right to protect themselves," I said, "I won't pretend that Torchwood doesn't disgust me with their methods and their methodology and that violence shouldn't be the first answer to something outside your understanding, but do not _fucking_ deny what desperate and frightened people are capable of or decry it as bare-faced cruelty. The Sycorax proved the worth of their word when their champion tried to stab you in the back immediately after promising on the blood of his race to leave peacefully."

The Doctor stared through me. "What's your investment in this? What do you get out of letting humans become the new Daleks?"

I refused to move. "They are nothing of the sort and you _know_ it. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings, as is the right to fight to preserve that freedom. They won't become the kind of race that _exterminates_ everything that isn't like them just because their first official contact happens to be with some of the worst the universe has to offer."

I couldn't help putting the emphasis of the Daleks on their word. Ex-ter-min-ate. The sight of the Doctor's Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed told me how clearly he caught my meaning, though his reply was surprisingly cool.

"And you told _me_ not to crib cartoons for my grand speeches," he said smoothly.

At least Optimus Prime was more relevant to the situation than fucking cartoon Hamlet with less death and more talking animals.

"And you defend sinners – slavers even – as if they are sheep," I replied, "Very easy now that they are dead and incapable of hurting anyone else. Don't twist history to suit your whims or agendas, Time Lord."

The silence stretched, not out of awkwardness, but out of a thick, strangling tension.

"What is Torchwood?" the Doctor finally asked.

"Old, cold, and no place an alien should ever go alive," I answered, "regardless of what they may or may not have done."

The Doctor gave me a look, as if measuring my worth by sight alone. "I don't know what you are."

There are more things in heaven and earth, Doctor, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

"There's a club for that. Sign up for the newsletter; it's full of all sorts of interesting theories. Some more wrong than others."  
I cast a glance towards the east, where the first trickle of dawn seemed to tickle at the night sky, obscuring the stars closest to the horizon, and grimaced. Twilight. Fitting, but also a cue to cut and run.

"Anyway, love the conversation, but I don't really _do_ daylight," I said, "So, allow me to wish you a Merry Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus or whatever other holiday you may personally observe on this day. May all your roasts be tender and mild and let the Sycorax be the only conflict to color this day of peace."

The last was directed towards the Doctor as I gave him one final look, one that I hoped screamed something between 'don't do it ho' and 'don't test me bitch' before I turned on my heel and started walking quickly down the street.

Footsteps clattered behind me but I dissolved into shadowy pixels before whoever they belonged to could reach me.

I sighed, finally taking a breath as I reformed into reality in an alley far away from the Powell Estates and I switched forms from Twili to human. It was odd, feeling your ears melt away and the very density of your bones shift from the ghostly to the odd balance between steady and fragile that was humanity.

Well, at least the confrontation that I'd been so worked over had been painless. Well, relatively.

I brushed my hand back through my hair, noting wryly that was now was the same shade of brown the Doctor thought so little of.

My smile fell quickly. It would be only a matter of hours before I found out if I'd been able to offset Ten's temper and I had a sinking feeling that, despite everything I'd done, I hadn't.

Maybe I should have just gone with Stupid Brain Goblin Plan A and dragged him bodily off by his stupid sideburns. But there was no use thinking about it.

For now, I just needed to be removed for a bit. From everything.

* * *

 

The Doctor stared into the TARDIS wardrobe, thumbing through the different jackets, coats, and shirts without really looking at them.

Usually, he enjoyed this step more. The joy of finding what colors and textures and patterns spoke to his new personality and, occasionally, messing with people's expectations simply because he could. He could still remember the look on the Brigadier's face when his Fourth had come out wearing the clown costume. Or using an interplay of puns and costume to irritate the Rani, though his Seventh had thought her Mel at the time. Should have figured it out from the lack of pureed vegetables being pushed his way, but alas.

Ah, still good times.

But, the Doctor noted as he let his smile fall, something kept nagging.

Something about that alien woman. Not the mystery of her exact species, though the Doctor would love the answer to that one, but the dialogue. The motivation.

She _knew_ something. About him, about the Time Lords, about the Time War… he wasn't sure. But there was definitely something that was tied to one of those three topics. And, stranger still, she had a seemingly benign attitude towards the Earth and its inhabitants.

And, because he had no idea what she had even done with that teleportation trick, he had no way to track her down and bother her for an answer. It didn't leave a signal like a transmat, it didn't leave a trace like a Vortex Manipulator, it was just there and then gone again.

That was an awful lot of 'and's.

But that teleport broke physics as he knew them and The Doctor refused to call it magic because magic did not exist.

One could warp probability and occasionally small parts of reality with psychic powers filtered through the trappings of 'witchcraft', but this… this wasn't that. Was it like a watered down power of the Guardians? Had some 'higher' power interfered with the invasion? For what end?

'Freedom is the right of all sentient beings'.

Hah. If there was a Guardian of Freedom, the Doctor wouldn't have _half_ the reputation he did for stirring up trouble.

His thumb hit something that brought his thoughts back to reality. He looked down at the coat. Oh, the one he'd killed Janet Joplin's favorite sofa for. Why, in retrospect, he wasn't certain. His Eighth had been prone to whims and impromptu arts-and-crafts sessions.

Still, those whims occasionally worked out fantas… fanthasti… thanthasitic… good grief, he couldn't even _think_ the word right anymore, which was a pity, because he was meaning to use it later this evening.

The coat was perfect though. It just needed…

The Doctor's smile widened into a proper grin as he noticed the pinstriped suit just a few hangers down. "Ah. That's perfect."

* * *

 

**6:58 PM, Christmas, 2006**

* * *

 

I sat on the edge of a rooftop, on the other side of the guard railing, watching people walk by on the street below. As night had fallen, the numbers had trickled down as windows lit up, behind which parties and other Christmas celebrations commenced.

I rarely celebrated Christmas itself – many universes and cultures didn't even have it, though analogues weren't uncommon –, but without some kind of companionship it was incredibly lonely being on the edges of all that holiday cheer.

Snow was falling, and if you cared to glance upward, like many people were doing, you might catch the spectacle of a meteor show streaking across the upper atmosphere between the clouds.

It wasn't as wondrous as many of the civilians would think.

The snow was snow, even if at the hearts of some of the flakes were bits of ash from the Sycorax ship, and the meteor shower had come from the same source. A rather morbid sort of cloud seeding, but not much different than snow or rain built around particles of man-made pollution.

Still, it was infectious, just listening to the atmosphere of people enjoying themselves. Harriet Jones had not been sacked. Two unnecessary deaths had been averted. Even through the haze of my limiter, the feeling of peace and joy _sang_. They deserved this day.

They always deserved this day.

"Ah! Hello."

Anything resembling a smile slipped off of my face as the Doctor leaned against the railing at my back, smiling down at me.

What was he doing here? Had he figured me out… no. That was a pleasantly meaningless smile, not a 'look how clever I am' smile. He hadn't. So that meant he was on a whim or the TARDIS thought he should be here. Or maybe a third, infinitely less mundane option was in play. I really did hate my 'patron' sometimes.

"Rooftops," he said, savoring the word, "Excellent places for pondering the big questions, like the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

"Forty-two."

The Doctor gave me a blank look. "What."

"It's from a book," I explained, faintly amused by the idea of explaining Douglas Adams to a character who the man had written for. "These aliens built this big old computer to give the ultimate answer of Life, The Universe, and Everything. Seven and a half million years of computation later, it comes up with forty-two. They ask it what the deuce that's supposed to mean and it tells them that it can't answer that question. So they build _another_ computer to figure out the ultimate question to match the ultimate answer." I smiled. "It got wrecked fifteen minutes in and the programmers had to appease the mob with Bob Dylan."

"Ah," the Doctor said in the understanding way of the man who understood nothing of what was just said. "So! An American in London. Whatever happened to 'I'll Be Home For Christmas'?"

"'If only in my dreams'…," I half-sang before I hooked my fingers around the top of the railing and stood up, twisting around to face the alien. If he was concerned about the fact I was balanced on less than a five inch wide ledge, it didn't show on his face. "Never liked that song. Way too much radio airtime round the hols. 'sides, no home to be going to. It's just me and my thoughts tonight. Maybe a cup of hot cocoa later if I can find a decent place."

"Sounds awful lonely," the Doctor said quietly.

At his half-pitying look, I shrugged.

"I'm not particularly bothered. I'm not exactly what you would call an 'ex-tro-vert'," I said as I hopped the rest of the way over the rail and onto the roof, continuing to walk along an imaginary balance beam with my arms held wide. I could see the TARDIS parked just behind the roof access, only a corner of the blue police box visible at first but eventually in full, glorious view as I came close enough. "I mean, being alone sucks, but it's better than living amongst the asshole orchard from which I sprung. I'd go crazy. Or worse; native."

I turned on my heel, twisting around to look back at the Doctor.

"But enough about me; what about you? What sort of man sees a girl sitting on all alone a rooftop and decides, 'ah, well, might as well intrude'?"

My brief imitation of his accent brushed aside, he stood up straight, switching his hands from the pockets of his trousers to the pockets of his coat with the same action.

"Well, many could argue that intruding is my lifestyle. Intru da door, intru da window… occasionally intru da ceiling, but," the Doctor held up his hands in a signal to stop, as if I was about to make an attempt at the action described, "I really don't recommend that one. Hurts like the dickens if you don't stick the landing just right and sometimes they try to make you pay for their new skylight."

This incarnation of the Doctor was charming, the sort that you could get dazzled by and lost in if you didn't keep a little bit of perspective on hand. Without the benefit of the TV show, I would have been a fast friend, only maybe becoming aware of his less admirable traits when they reared their head in the worst kind of way.

"Mm. Lot of running in that sort of lifestyle, I imagine," I said, very obviously eyeing his sneakers.

"Oh yes. To and from things. Very exciting," he agreed before tilting his head to the side, "Care to give it a try?"

Oh. An invitation from someone who reminded me of so many things I didn't like about myself, life, and the multi-universe. If the options were anything other than the very real chance of running into Torchwood, I might not have taken it.

But as the situation stood…

"Why not?" I said, "Might see something _new_."

The Doctor grinned and his coat flared out dramatically as he walked over to the TARDIS. "Follow me."

Well now. Two could play at this game.

He paused dramatically in front of the door. "Now, try not to freak out when you see what's inside…"

"A real live bobby?"

The dramatic moment ground to a halt like a record scratch. "What?"

"It's a police box. Says so right there," I said, pointing, "My natural assumption there would be a police inside."

"It's not… it's not a 'police' police box. Just happens to look like one."

"Not very much."

The non-existent record scratched again.

"What?"

God, this was some of the most fun I'd ever had. "They've sell coffee out of 'em up in Edinburgh and not only are they red rather than blue, they're a lot fatter. Saw another in Scarborough that was blue, but not even a little like this one."

"She's a slim fit!" the Doctor said in exasperation, his hands leaving the handle to fly up into the air. "Blimey, it's like you don't even want to see what's inside…"

I fought down my snickering fit and waved for him to go on. "No, no. I do. I just _really_ like messing with you."

"We've only just met."

"You look almost exactly like my brother; it's instinct."

The Doctor paused, thinking it over before making a face and asking, "Really?" as if being compared to a mundane human was some kind of poorly constructed low blow.

The similarity _was_ a minor exaggeration. My stepbrother had been a lot like me despite the lack of common blood between us; brown-haired, brown-eyed, with similarly angled eyebrows, a tendency towards bedhead, and a top height of around five foot seven. The Doctor wasn't even close to being that short, though he was easily just as wide as me at the shoulder.

But beyond the coloring, the hair, and the approximate dimensions of the face, they couldn't be more different. Will had almost always had a half-conscious, half-stoned expression, even after nursing a cup of black coffee before school, while the Doctor's eyes never seemed to have any positions between 'open wide' and 'closed'.

I couldn't even properly imagine the Time Lord wearing any of Will's usual wardrobe of worn jeans and printed tees.

David Tennant, yes. The Tenth Doctor? No… well, maybe the lobster hat, because now that I had imagined it, I couldn't unsee it.

Dammit.

"Anyway, so long as you don't have a lobster hat, I'm sure it's not likely to pop up again," I said, trying to shove the damn thing out of my mental space. "So, go on. Show me the thing."

The Doctor didn't look entirely convinced, but he turned back to the TARDIS. "Anyway, first rule…" he said just before he pushed open the doors and I caught my first sight of the actual TARDIS.

My first steps inside were automatic as my head tilted back and my jaw dropped. I turned on my heel, twisting around to see everything around me.

Oh, she was _beautiful_.

"…don't panic," the Doctor finished with a smile.


	3. Chapter 3

For all my problems with Series Two of the revival and the Tenth Doctor in general, I had no problem what so ever with his TARDIS. For all the coral theme was supposed to be worse than the to-this-point unseen leopard skin option and the console was all 'grunge-phase', I loved it. It was alien, but alien in a way that felt like home.

Maybe that was part of growing up in a house that was half hoarder hell and half nineteen seventies time capsule, but it really did feel like a place where I – both the me that I was at the start and the me I was now – could stand without feeling out of place.

So, maybe you could actively tell which bits were retro-Earth junk and which bits were actually TARDIS – or at least alien – originals, but hell, my god, this aesthetic. No, forget the aesthetic, this _atmosphere._

Even with the inclusion of the mundane all around, you could believe that this was a time machine capable of so much more than just skipping back a couple centuries on a whim. The domed ceiling called to the dramatic, even without use of the cheap shorthand of darkness and dramatic lighting. Blue light from the rotor mingled with the earthy glow of orange coral struts in ways the Earth never employed outside of the most obscure scratches of desert, and even then, those paled in comparison to this beautiful living machine that hummed like… like the universe itself was singing through her internal machinery.

It was almost too much to think about both the ambiance and the physical reality at once, but… I could see, Christ, I could see octarine, stardust, and time itself threading through the air like material things, or… or like I was looking into the skies of Skyrim, projected onto ceiling of the TARDIS. My god, it was like going to Disneyland and finding Kingdom Hearts. Forget actual magic, _this_ was magical, never mind that this universe didn't even believe in the stuff.

"Well?" the Doctor asked after a moment of me drinking in the experience that was the TARDIS, "Whaddaya think? Anything you'd like to say or did I strike you speechless?"

I turned around again, not even bothering to hide my own breathless smile. "Oh. My. God."

"I know right?" he said with a grin.

"It's bigger!"

"Uh-huh."

"–on the inside– "

"That's what they always say." The Doctor was nearly preening from where he leaned against the TARDIS console, one leg crossed over the other and his arms folded neatly as he watched me drift across the room.

I was about to destroy that smile in the best possible way.

"–than it is…"

The smile dropped like a wine glass. "…what are you doing?"

I gestured theatrically towards the door with both hands. "–on the _outside_!"

"No, seriously. What. Are. You. Doing?" the Doctor asked.

"My _entire_ understanding of physical space has been _transformed_!" I cried, my hands flying up to my head as if to prevent my skull from shattering apart.

"Alright, _now_ I just think you're just taking the piss."

My hands were now in proper flight, flitting through the approximate motions of what I was describing blended with what I remembered and all to the tempo and speed of what was admittedly one of my absolute favorite Doctor Who scenes.

"Three-dimensional Euclidian geometry has been torn up, thrown into the air, and snogged to death!" I cried.

The Doctor himself had placed his face in his hands. "Is this mockery? It tastes a lot like mockery. Served up with a slice of shameless ham on poorly made American bannock bread," he muttered.

"My grasp of the universal constraints of physical reality has been changed…" I turned around to face him as my voice dropped to a stage whisper, "forever."

He finally dragged his hands down his face, allowing me to delight in his absolutely done expression. "Are you done yet? Or have you noticed an area of the TARDIS you haven't chewed on yet?"

"Sorry, but I've always wanted to see that done properly," I grinned – half sheepish, half puckish – before I dropped the accent. "And the ham is so tasty… and so much _fun_."

"I'm not even going to _ask_ what the source material for that was." The Doctor declared, throwing his hands up in the air, "And what was the express purpose of the Scottish accent? Because I'm going to ask you to never do that again."

"It would have been a slight to the actor not to."

The Doctor looked skeptical for a moment before turning back to the console and pulling around a screen. "Well, before you get inspired to do an impersonation of Brian Blessed, I do need some help."

"With what?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing much," he said as he poked away at a few buttons, dismissing the storm of rotating symbols that I vaguely understood to be some form of Gallifreyan to replace it with some other function of his Frankensteinian system, "There's just an alien running around town and I've need a little help drawing it out so I can figure out what it is and what its game is."

Wait, was the Doctor asking me to help him track myself down? What?

"What kind of alien? Cause if you're expecting me to mess with something like those guys who took over the broadcast last night, oh man…"

"No, no, _they're_ not anything for you to worry about," the Doctor said, still thumbing different sections of the touch screen, "No, this… I'm not sure what it is. Honestly, I only stumbled upon it on accident. Y'see, someone got a video camera for Christmas this morning…"

He pulled the screen around so I could see it clearly and any questions of exactly _why_ he was looking at random people's home videos were shoved to the side as I watched.

The video was immediately identifiable as amateur. The camera shuddered and shook as its operator jumped around the room, swinging it around to showcase blurred shots of what I assumed to be the living room. There was a television, a sofa, a couple of chairs occupied by a pair of crinkly grandparents, and a younger sibling establishing a kingdom of shredded wrapping paper in front of the Christmas tree.

Two adults were bustling around the dining room in the background, a man and a woman. Married, possibly, though the dedicated disinterest of one of the parties didn't bode for a happy one.

In contrast to the fun of discovering what new toys can do going on in the living room, they seemed to be arguing. Not coming to blows or any sort of physical aggression, but the man was clearly upset and trying to get the woman to listen to him. She turned away from him and the light must have caught _just_ right, because her eyes lit up…

Wait. Even if film cameras did manage red-eye, this wasn't red and limited to the pupil. This was bright acid yellow and, for one awful second, it had swallowed the whole eye.

I looked away from the screen. "That's what we're looking for? If you know where it is, it shouldn't be too hard to trace its history if it's living like a human. Paper and electronic trails everywhere."

"Mmmhmm, caught the eyeshine, didn't ya?" the Doctor said, "I did, actually. Lisa Belfrey née Petty, born 1972, married since 1993, mother of two. Nothing to indicate she was anything less than normal for the last thirty four years of her life. Except…"

The video was replaced by some security camera footage of a dark snowy street. Despite the sudden switch to grainy black and white, I could pick out Lisa walking down the street with a bag of groceries in each hand.

"– this video. 'bout a week old. So, my shiny new assistant; what do you see?"

Nobody was looking at her when a light swiped across the screen and she tripped... wait.

No.

No, she hadn't.

"Play it back, half speed," I said. The Doctor did exactly that and I watched it again, this time watching as closely as humanly possible.

Lisa had been walking and, in the moment before she had 'tripped', there had been that light. Not glare, but like a laser shot. It had struck her and in that moment, the video had fuzzed. When the electronic snow had cleared, the shopping bags were on the ground, Lisa bending down to collect them again.

Except when she stood back up and started walking again, it wasn't quite the fluid gait she had before. It was ever so slightly off… much like the Lisa in the Christmas video.

"So, you have some kind of… replicant," I murmured, "and someone on the outside pulling the strings, swapping them out with humans."

"Yep, there's some sort a changeling running around. Pretty swift for someone I just picked up," the Doctor said before leaning in close. "Can I be absolutely certain you aren't a UNIT scientist in disguise?" he asked in a low, serious voice.

I ignored the fact that he was way too close and – almost a secondary point in the initial reaction of 'nope' – not radiating the sort of detectable heat a human would be giving off at this range. Anyone that wasn't actively paying attention to every possible detail would have never picked up the discrepancy, though any heat sensor would likely highlight the difference instantly. "If I worked for any branch of the UN, I think I'd at _least_ be invited to the office Christmas party."

"Meh, if they're anything like I remember, you didn't miss much," the Doctor said as he finally exited my personal space to relax in one of the taped over chairs, "but enough about that. Do you have any ideas about our body snatcher and their mysterious pod people?"

People? As in plural? "At a guess, they picked her because she was an easy target. It was dark, unpleasant weather, not many people out… nobody to notice if something usual happened," I shook my head before continuing, "Without any more information, I can't really speculate more than that."

"Fair enough, fair enough, you're only human after all," he said before buffing his nails on the lapel of his jacket.

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Two videos, rather limited in what information they contained and he expected me to produce more than 'something replaced this woman through strange and usual means?'. Data, data, you cannot make bricks without clay, and you cannot make a case without clues.

"Well," I said, stretching out the word, "unless you have a way of tracing whatever our mysterious alien did to replace Lisa Belfrey with her bright-eyed doppelganger, I don't know how you'd hope find out exactly what happened… barring the use of casual time travel, of course."

The Doctor just grinned.

"Oh, so instead of _just_ being the most beautiful thing ever, she also travels in time. Brilliant," I said, brushing my hand over the glassy outside of the time rotor. Sorry about playing the fool, sweet lady. "Style _and_ substance in one lovely bigger-on-the-inside package."

"You keep flirting with the TARDIS like that and I might just get jealous," the Doctor said as he came over to the controls, hands sliding over the various switches and nodules, flipping a few into different positions before grabbing onto a Lever.

There's a difference between a lever and a Lever with a Capital L.

A lever usually just does something, without fuss or show. A lever might as well be a light switch with a smidge of style or retro sensibility.

In contrast, a Lever with a Capital L did something big and was never capable of _not_ being at least a little dramatic. It was a fact of construction, because a Lever with a Capital L never came in a size under 'three times as big as it really needed to be' and not a single one ever did its job without making some kind of big noise. If that noise was the grind of rust resisting against your next, possibly blasphemous action, the clang of that final fatal switch falling into place as you prepared to venture into areas man was not meant to touch, or simply the almighty hum of something great and terrible about to happen because you had to Do The Thing, it was a necessary part of the Ambiance.

A Lever could really look like anything, but if you wanted to do it in the classic style, you used a knife switch at least the size of the average user's hand.

The Doctor's Lever was roughly twice the size of the hand holding it.

"You _might_ want to hold onto something," he said, right before he threw it.

* * *

The Doctor watched the girl fall to the floor, eyes wide and arms scrambling as the TARDIS shuddered through a very short trip through the Vortex. Compared to the dually smug and playful look she'd been wearing for most of their interaction, it was quite different… and a little amusing.

Turnabout is fair play, after all, and he _did_ warn her.

"And here we are; at the scene of the crime, five minutes before said crime is set to occur," he said, leaning back from the controls to lean against the railing around the main console, only an arm's reach away from where the girl had wrapped herself around one of the supports. "You doing alright down there?" he asked casually, though he wasn't entirely capable of keeping the grin off his face.

"Your eyebrows are forfeit, you spiky fuck," she wheezed as she slowly began to work her fingers free of the death grip she'd locked onto the railing.

The Doctor shook his head, stepping back to check the scanner. Ah, yes. The TARDIS had parked in alley with a clear view of the street previously seen on only surveillance tape. There didn't seem to be a living soul… no, there was a cat wandering about.

Not quite the Lisa Belfrey they were looking for… ah. There she was, walking down the street with two bags filled with the various Christmas necessities. Light dress for winter, but 2006 had been somewhat mild as far as London was concerned.

"There's our victim," he murmured, watching her walk along. "…now where's our body snatcher?"

The alley was empty, no-one else was on the street…

"The hell is that?"

"What?"

"The… tentacle midget," she said, pointing at the screen before giving him an aside glance. "What, is there something else out there worth a 'what the hell'?"

The Doctor looked past her finger to the other alley on the _opposite_ side of the street, where a short, obviously alien figure was fiddling with a remote-control like device. Three thick 'tentacles' or, more accurately, flesh tendrils, trailed down the back of its head and its flat, shiny-skinned face was twisted in to a manic grin as its pale eyes twinkled in the dark.

Ah. A minor miscalculation on the location, one that he would not be mentioning. "Ah. That would be a Graske. Surprising and unsurprising all at once."

"Explain."

"Oh, they do this sort of thing. Sort of their species' hat. They make these attempts every now and then to take over worlds using 'changelings'. Unfortunately, they're not particularly good at picking targets or… not making a mess of things," the Doctor said. "I mean, they've gotten a couple successes, but win-to-lose, they're like the Chudley Cannons."

Its task finished, the Graske teleported away with a flash of blue transmat.

Ah, finally. Something the Doctor could work with. "Aaand there's our trace. Excellent…" he jumped around to the other side of the console, typing in the appropriate information into the computer. "Rose, if you'll take the controls, I'll handle the trajectory…"

"Uh, one wrinkle in that plan," she replied, an edge of annoyance coloring her tone, "I'm not Rose."

Oh yes. Not Rose.

"Sorry 'bout that," the Doctor said as he leaned around the rotor and over the console to point at the appropriate items. "Alright, here are the basics. Big lever thing to your immediate front and left is the dimensional stabilizer. Knobby little thing with the dial to your lower right is the vector tracker. And the stick-y looking thing between them is the vortex loop. You pump it."

Her hand flew away from that particular bit of machinery almost automatically. "I'm hoping you mean 'sticky' as in 'stick-like', not actually…" She made a jerking gesture that was vaguely recognizable as obscene.

"Yes! No! Why would you even think of that?" he cried before holding up a hand. "Rhetorical. Anyway, we've got a Graske to track. Just pull, pump, and twist the respective whatsits when I tell you."

He turned back to his half of the console and began initializing the take-off. The TARDIS shuddered as the rotor began pumping up and down and then, as it finished dematerializing, the shuddering sped into a vague sensation of being spun at a high speed, centripetal forces seeming to focus on some area behind the navel.

The Doctor was long used to it. Just another quirk of the TARDIS, one of many that it'd picked up over the centuries. Besides, one only really felt it in the console room, at the 'center' of the motion.

"Vortex loop!" he yelled and there was zero hesitation before his new companion pumped it, despite her initial misgivings about the 'sticky thing'.

"Brilliant! Dimensional stabilizer, followed by a thirty-degree twist to the left on the vector tracker."  
"My left or your left?"

"It's everybody's left! Now pull and twist!"

"Next thing I know, you're going to hand me a Bop-It and tell me that defeating it decides the fate of the planet…" she muttered, though she performed the actions perfect, down to the exact twist of the vector tracker.

The TARDIS pitched to the right before coming to an abrupt halt, the wheezing sound of materialization surrounding them before fading into the time machine's normal low hum. The Doctor peeled himself off of the console.

"Bit of a bumpy ride, but we managed to get here ahead of that Graske…" he said as he twisted around to the scanner. "And we are… on Earth. London. Christmas."

That wasn't right. What was the point of transmatting back to where you just… the Doctor noticed the year and then turned on the scanner.

"Ah. Well. Earth, London, Christmas, _1883_ ," he said, before casting a glance at his new companion.

Five foot six, maybe a hair under nine stone. Messy hair, visible scarring on the neck and chin, natural predilection to snark easily visible on face. Dressed very much like a twenty-first century youth; blue track jacket over a waistcoat and a printed jumper, paired with skinny jeans, trainers, and a long red woolen scarf that was harried at the ends.

Definitely not a fit with Victorian values.

The girl looked over at the screen and at the figures walking around in heavy, dark clothing and grimaced as comprehension dawned. "Well, isn't that just _ducky_."

"I'll show you where the wardrobe is," he said.

* * *

Period clothes are infinitely better when you have a body built for looking good in them.

My default wasn't and thus didn't.

Any suit that seemed like something I was willing to wear was always too tall or too broad in the shoulder. Any dress that I felt willing to tolerate was built for more substantial curves than what I had or featured a neckline lower than I was willing to go.

Being a roadmap of scars when society expects you to be unsullied by such earthly does that.

Anything that might fit… well, if there was anything that might fit my body and preference, it had yet to materialize from the depths of the TARDIS's multi-dimensional wardrobe.

"Do you even _have_ anything in my size, Doctor?" I quietly asked the empty room as I slid out of another failed fit.

It shouldn't have been this hard to find something, I wasn't such a different size than any of the companions I remembered…

I stared at the Eighth Doctor's coat as I shoved another on-sight reject to the side.

"Aaah…"

It was the one I remembered from the movie, which hadn't looked so great on nineties quality film, but in actual, tangible reality it was infinitely better. Probably because it didn't seem to crinkle. Velvet so soft and luxuriantly plush you could have almost mistaken it for pure black had the green highlights not been so sumptuously bold…

No, I scolded myself as I shoved it back. Not only wildly not okay – I liked Eight, I couldn't think of a single person aware of the show who didn't like Eight, and I wasn't going to just grab –, it wasn't even _kind of_ suitable for a cold December night.

Now if my hand would only let go of it.

It wouldn't.

Dammit.

I tossed the velvet coat over my shoulder as I went about the business of finding the rest of my era-appropriate outfit. I promised myself I'd put it back once I found another, more reasonable replacement.

I didn't, and ended up wearing a slightly more uptight and darker version of the rest of his costume, with a high collared starched shirt, black tie, relatively unadorned waistcoat, and slim grey trousers. My shoes I kept. Regardless of if zebra striped Converse were era appropriate or not, I doubted if the options available in 1883 offered as much traction. Besides, I didn't have the time or the patience to figure out the difference between American and British shoe-sizing again.

Other variations of myself might have bothered, but they were shut away for now, barely a passing awareness of what-had-been in the back of my mind.

If I wanted to, I could let them out. Just for a moment. All it would take was a twist, a loosening of the limiter band I wore on my right wrist. Of course, part of the problem in doing that would be the shift in my psychic signature and the flood of repressed data coming in…

Not worth it, I decided, pulling my hand away from the leather brace. This was a vacation, a human – well mostly human – experience of the extraordinary. No powers needed, break glass in case of emergency.

Giving the mirror a final turn, I walked back to the console room, where the Doctor fiddled with the scanner and other bits of associated technology.

If the Doctor recognized the coat or the silk-lined inverness cape I had on over it – I was absolutely certain that it had belonged to Three at some point –, he didn't show anything more than a raised eyebrow.

"Cape's a bit long, don't you think?" he asked.

"It's December, it's a cape, it's era appropriate, it halfway disguises my shoes, and it's cool," I said as I spun a top hat around in my hands. Part of me cringed at the idea of slapping this on over the currently oiled down mess I called my hair, but it was all part of the final image. Besides, I knew from experience that it didn't damage it as much as my internal cringe thought it would. "It was a pain finding anything in my size in there, lovely as your selection of items is."

"Making me look positively underdressed here," the Doctor said, though he made no motion towards changing his own outfit. "Anyway, shall we go?"

I dropped the hat onto my head, pulling the brim down just a hair in front before flipping up the collar of the cape to obscure my face. "Wouldn't want the Graske to get away," I said as I followed the Doctor out of the door and into another century.

The moon was different; nearly the opposite of the waxing cat's grin that I'd seen above the Sycorax ship not even twenty hours ago in my own personal timeline, but the sliver was still enough to set the snow-covered streets aglow. As if to counter the cold and silver glow, a multitude of fires were burning. Lamp posts, small furnaces, even battered metal barrels glowed with golden-red flame along the street.

Against the chill and all logic, people filled the streets. Well, Christmas ran against logic, so it only made sense, I supposed. A hundred and twenty years in the future, the streets weren't so crowded or bright.

Oh, the streets of this London can be very dark and very lonely, part of me muffled by the limiter murmured as memory pulled.

Not now. The hunt was on for fresh quarry, not old memoriam. This wasn't Whitechapel.

"You're taking this rather well," the Doctor said.

"Enter time machine, travel time. Rather uncomplicated chain of events," I said as we sidestepped a man distributing mulled wine and Christmas salutations.

"Mmm. Did I mention it also travels in space?"

I shrugged as we passed a naked Christmas tree. It was odd looking at one without the trappings of glass globes, tinsel, or even a paltry ring of popcorn on a string. "It was kind of implied, considering you went from the roof of a building to an alley a week prior, never mind that you'd also have to compensate for the Earth's orbit and rotation to stick said landing in the first place."

"…are you _absolutely_ sure you're not a UNIT scientist?" the Doctor asked after a beat.

"Someone had a discussion online about the exact logic of the time travel used in _The Time Machine_ once and I remembered the gist of it, that's all," I said as I gave what I hoped was a subtle look to a nearby post box. I didn't think that the Graske would actually fit in there, but I wasn't about to overlook even the dumb possibilities. "So any ideas as to where our little problem is hiding?"

"Ah, the internet. A series of interconnected tubes full of weird, disgusting, memes, and cats," the Doctor mused. "And, no. No idea. He's on this street though. Maybe looking for his next victim, maybe just to throw something at the carolers. Probably the first one though. Keep those eyes peeled."

As we passed a carriage, the horse snorted, ears swiveling around as it eyed a pile of packages not far from it. I followed its gaze. Horses were skittish creatures even at the best of times, but I'd long learned not to ignore any animal's reaction to their environment.

So I wasn't terribly surprised by the sight of our target lurking just behind the largest of the parcels.

"Doctor–" I started.

The Graske ran out into the open and the street exploded into screams of fear and confusion, because there are only so many ways for normal people to react to the sudden appearance of a tentacle goblin with a face last seen on a rabid naked mole rat.

The Doctor reeled back, sonic screwdriver almost jumping into his hand from his pocket, but it was too late. The Graske had aimed and fired its remote control at a street urchin and, upon seeing the doppelganger rise back to full height with a flash of gold in its eyes, teleported away in a flash of blue.

"I've got the signal!" the Doctor said, grabbing my arm. "Back to the TARDIS!"

We ran through the transfixed crowd and back into the TARDIS, where the Doctor loaded the sonic screwdriver into a slot. Numbers and symbols jumped to life on a screen and the Doctor set to work on deciphering them.

"Oh, finally. Griffith, the legendary planet of the Graske. Bit old school, using their home world as their base of operations, but it's a destination we can use!" he said, turning around to the various sides of the of the console, flipping switches and turning dials before grabbing the Lever.

This time, I grabbed the railing _before_ he threw it, only letting go once the TARDIS's flight stabilized.

"I've just got one question."

"Shoot!" the Doctor said as he ran around the dials. "Or rather, ask away. I don't like guns. Don't like using guns, don't like having guns pointed at me. I've just a general antipathy towards that sort of thing."

I rolled my eyes as I tossed my cape to the side. "Okay, so the Graske are using time travel, using Victorian London as a hopping point before skittering off back to their home sphere. Sort of like bouncing a cellphone signal off of multiple towers or using an anonymizer."

"Yup. Are we getting to the question part yet?"

"…yet," I continued, "they're 'collecting' from at _least_ two different eras in the same city, running the chance of 'collecting' the descendant or ancestor of someone they've already replaced, possibly setting up a paradox? Are they new to time travel or just stupid?"

I couldn't even see the most idiotic time traveler being that dense, unless they were deliberately trying to fuck up the space-time continuum or simply didn't care.

The Doctor shook his head in a way I identified as meaning 'a bit of Column A, bit of Column B' as he pulled on some other switches, including the one I remembered as the vortex loop.

"It's a bit of a tossup. They like to play pranks, but they're also partial to power. They also have a habit of underestimating what kind of powers they're playing with. Their sister species, the Groske, are a _bit_ smarter, in both the technology and common sense departments, but they don't exactly exchange Christmas cards, if you catch my meaning."

Before I could respond to that, the TARDIS landed and the Doctor checked the scanner.

"Well, this as close as I can land the TARDIS, because whatever this place is, the Graske have shielded it to the gills. Means there must be something rather important inside."

He grinned as he released the door.

"What do you say to finding out what it is?"

* * *

So far there had been two code protected airlocks, three locked blast doors, seven long hallways, and five security systems capable of reducing the typical target to laser-sizzled Swiss cheese. Whatever this base was to the Graske, it was important. Or maybe they were just paranoid, the Doctor thought as the sonic screwdriver finally finished with yet another puzzle-lock.

"If they bothered to have live guards, we wouldn't have gotten this far," the girl murmured as she scanned the dark halls for any movement.

"Well, they probably guard the accesses they actually use," he said, pointing to the old and rotted wires and tubes that hung from the ceiling. "They probably haven't used this one in _years_ , likely on account of having the transmat. Easier than digging new tunnels and cheaper than repairing the old."

She seemed to accept the answer, though that didn't stop her from keeping watch as the door slid open to reveal… another code-locked door.

"Must have a thing about porches," the Doctor said as he got started on solving it, sonic screwdriver flipping through frequencies and settings as the different elements slid into and out of the positions required to open it.

Tricky and time-consuming to solve, but not impossible.

"I forgot to ask… what's your name?" he asked as he worked.

There was an uncomfortable pause before she finally answered. "…Delaine. It's Delaine."

The Doctor smiled. "Nice to meet you, Delaine. I'm the Doctor."

Any further conversation was cut off by the door finally opening with a hiss of pressurized hair.

The Doctor and Delaine pressed themselves up against the wall as it because clear that unlike all the halls behind them, this room wasn't dark or deserted. No, the huge space was absolutely full with the bustle of activity, dozens Graske scuttling about between large pods that clustered around specialized cryonic machinery.

"These pods contain the victims of the Graske. People from all around the universe," he murmured.

"They need them alive to keep their replicants going?" Delaine asked, eying a pod that contained a full grown Slitheen.

"Exactly," the Doctor said, before nodding to a Graske that was fiddling around with a control panel. "And there's the Graske we've been following."

The alien plugged the remote-control it had been using to abduct humans into a slot on the panel, pressing a series of buttons. Soon, two more pods were filled; one with the street urchin and the other with Lisa Belfrey.

"Those people are going to be in here forever if we don't do anything to stop the Graske… or they cause a paradox. Either way, neither counts as a happy ending."

Delaine nodded. "So we need to take the control panel," she said.

"Yes. There should be a way to reverse the settings–"

There was a shriek of alarm. The Doctor stared up at the Graske that had sounded the alarm before shoving the girl out of the way of a blast of purple blaster fire. "Run!"

The shot ricocheted, bouncing off of the metal floor at a wild angle to burn the control console and smash into one of the pod doors.

Naturally, it would be the one with the Slitheen.

The giant green alien stepped forward sluggishly, though it quickly shook off the daze of cryostorage and smashed a Graske into the floor.

Great, the Doctor thought. It was a distraction, certainly, but it was like saying 'oh yes, I distracted the horde of hyena by loosing a berserk hippopotamus on them, whilst I was in the same room'. Sure, it was marginally better to have the Graske running wild trying to stop _that_ rather than shooting at him and his companion, but still.

Un-ideal situation.

Delaine was over by the controls, obviously trying to make sense of the system. "Automatic return switch, automatic return switch…"

"Left button!" he yelled.

She punched it and the room lit up with blue transmat light, though they didn't hang around to watch all the captives get teleported back to their homes. Through the abandoned tunnels of the Graske, they ran, barely dodging the lasers of a reactivated security drone.

As soon as they were through the TARDIS doors, the Doctor activated the take-off sequence, coordinates set for Earth, and finally let loose a laugh as he turned around.

His companion was sitting on one of the chairs, previously flawless suit disheveled as she splayed her legs out over one of the arm rests. The velvet of her green coat – ah, his Eighth's, he thought it looked familiar – was spotted with dust and cobwebs, and her tie was undone, but there was no blood or visible tears.

And she was smiling. Also a plus.

"Brava brava!" the Doctor crowed before his smile took on a vaguely bemused shade. "No idea why I said that. Perhaps I like opera."

"Maybe you just like Italian."

"Molto bene," he said before his eyes lit up. "Ah! That's what this mouth was made for! Fantastic!"

He turned around, letting his coat flair out behind him before he turned to face the girl again. "Well, how was the adventure? Great way to spend a Christmas, wasn't it?"

Her smile widened into a proper grin. "Most fun I've had in years."  
The Doctor grinned himself. "Good! Because I'd like to extend an offer. Now, I only take the best and you… you were amazing! Running right to the controls through a firefight to send all the Graske's victims back home – ha!" he shook his head, still smiling. "Ah, that was mad, but… amazing never the less."

"You're asking me to come with you."

It wasn't a question.

"Well, yes," the Doctor said, rubbing the back of his head. "Unless you aren't interested…"

"Why wouldn't I be?" she said. "It's just… with your personality, you'd think you'd have all kinds of people hanging around."

There had been all kinds of people hanging around. They just… never did it all at once. And the Doctor didn't mind. So long as there wasn't an absence of people at all, he would be fine.

"Oh well, I've got Rose around usually," he said cheerily, "Dropped her off for an ABBA concert in 1979. Going to be headed for Ian Dury after this."

The TARDIS was on a trajectory to pick the blonde up now actually. How well the two interacted would be interesting.

As far as the Doctor could tell, Delaine was a personality that could switch between serious and playful as the situation demanded, though if one was more natural than the other he couldn't properly tell.

Maybe the serious, scientifically minded girl with the mind for deduction was her true self, tempered by humor to keep the world from being too dark. Maybe the silly, irreverent snark and passion for drama was authentic, and the practical down-to-earth bits were simply that; practical. Maybe she was simply both, an adult who hadn't forgotten how to be a child as well.

She could be dramatic and pragmatic in quick succession, without any real conflict between the two. She was smart, clearly, and brave, but that didn't exclude 'recklessness'.

Maybe the factor that pushed his decision to ask her over the edge to 'yes' was that she was alone. No family to go home to, no friends to be around. Just one girl sitting alone on the edge of a roof on Christmas.

He hoped Rose would like her.

But first – The Doctor parked the TARDIS and pulled the door release.

As Rose Tyler ran into the TARDIS, slightly damp from dancing up a storm at the ABBA concert, she was greeted by two things.

One was the sight of a young girl, maybe a year or two older than herself, wearing long out-of-date men's formal wear while splayed out on one of the TARDIS's chairs, apparently dozing.

The second was the Doctor. "Rose, do I look like a hedgehog?" he asked as he pulled on his hair.

"Uh," was an appropriate response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was just checking/researching British spellings and slang (part of the shifting viewpoints thing I've been doing on at least this fic; I try to keep the language appropriate to the character using/thinking it) and apparently they spell curb as 'kerb'?
> 
> Literally what the fuck. What the fuck. Whaat the fuck is going on over there?
> 
> Kerb.
> 
> Like I can see the technical reasons but seriously – 'KERB'?!
> 
> Forget it. I'm going to remain baffled for the next hour.
> 
> Anyway, this chapter's plot was based on the interactive episode 'The Attack of the Graske'. It's still available on the BBC website and at least one playthrough is available to watch on Youtube if you aren't good at puzzles.
> 
> Most of the fun was in writing the banter, I think. Love some well-executed banter.
> 
> As always, comments and criticism are welcome.  
> Kerb.


	4. Chapter 4

"Who's she?" Rose asked, already offended without even a hair of hesitation.

I sighed internally and cracked an eye open to glance at the blonde. Somehow, I wasn't surprised, for all that she'd been here for five seconds. She'd done it with Sarah Jane, Martha... hell, if it was female, possessed of a pulse, and had any kind of social intimacy with the Doctor, there was a fair chance that Rose Tyler Did Not Approve.

Idly, I wondered what she would have made of River Song. 'Attempted murder' came to mind.

"New companion," the Doctor said, as if that explained and excused my sudden introduction to what was formerly Rose's World. "Anyway, that's missing the point. Does my hair look like a hedgehog?"

"Sort of?" she said hesitantly.

"Ah… does that count as good or bad?"

"'s cute."

"Oh. Well, it's fine then," the Doctor said before rolling his head around to gesture at me in the laziest fashion possible in human body language. "That would be Delaine. I picked her up while you were out, resolved an oddity or two I'd noticed in London..."

I raised a two closed fingers in my own lackadaisical salute as the Doctor effectively summed up our adventure in about a third of the words necessary to really illustrate what actually happened. "Yo."

"A'ight," Rose murmured, as if that wasn't quite the answer she wanted. Maybe she was expecting something to the effect of 'nobody, and she will be fucking off shortly'. Unfortunately for her, I didn't really recall any other companion who'd gotten that response from the Doctor… though if there had to be an offender, it would have to be Six or Twelve. Maybe Three, if he was in a particularly prickly mood. "So where are we going next?"

"Well… we've got options…" the Doctor said as he turned around the TARDIS. "You wanted to see Ian Dury at some point, yes?"

"I can do that?"  
"I just picked you up from an ABBA in 1979, Rose. Wouldn't be any trouble to go to another concert in the same year," he pointed out as he slid in a CD that started belting out punk. "That's the beauty of living in a time machine. We can see the battle of Trafalgar, the Olympics – any year you please –, Caeser crossing the Rubicon… and yes, Ian Dury at the Top Rank, Sheffield, England, Earth, 21st November, 1979."

"I just forget sometimes," she said with a laugh. "But knowing all that off the top of your head; you're a big ol' punk!"

He drummed his hands along the edge of the console in time with the music. "It's good to be a lunatic," the Doctor sang as the TARDIS hurtled through history. I'd have to keep an eye out for some good vinyl when we got to an appropriate year. I doubted I'd find anything of interest in 1879 Scotland, but it was a memo for later adventures, not the immediate now.

"That's what you are," Rose said with a laugh, "a lunatic rockabilly punk in a big blue box."

Lunatic. Werewolf. What a bizarre symmetry, even if it was mere coincidence on the face. Everything came back to the moon, even if one term was long since washed of the association. Now, how would I go about the business of killing a werewolf?

Well, depending on how well kitted out the Torchwood estate was, I could probably just fill it with every piece of silverware they had…

"You want to change your clothes first?" Rose asked, breaking me out of thought. "'fore we get to the concert?"

I glanced down at myself. No, this wasn't really wasn't going to work for either potential venue, be it 1979 or 1879. "Don't really think that this is appropriate mosh wear," I said, lifting up the cobweb-covered lapel of the velvet coat before dropping it with a sigh. "This is why I can't have nice things."

"There's a closet marked for that, just hang 'em up and the TARDIS will clean them up," the Doctor said as he leaned back to listen to the rest of the album. "Usually. If the system isn't broken. Which it has been."

"Helpful."

"When it works, yes. Better than a dry cleaner. Now, shoo. Come back when you've got your stomping boots on."

* * *

"You're not even a little bit interested?" Rose asked again for the third time. We'd finally gotten to the wardrobe and I was half dressed, still wearing the shirt and trousers from before, as I looked around for my next outfit, but for Rose Tyler dogging my steps, trying to feel out if I was interested in what she felt was 'her territory', I'd found nothing. I really didn't want to be talking 'boys' with someone who'd made a solid effort at destroying two entire universes to get back to one. "He's rather fit, I think."

Some of the Doctor's other incarnations? Yes, definitely. Ten, who reminded me of my brother, middle school, high school, and the psychotic break in between?

No. _Hell_ no.

"Really not my type," I said as I looked at and dismissed another pair of trousers.

"What sort of type do you go for then?"

Of _course_ she'd pry.

"Off the top of my head? Curly or wavy hair, long enough that I can play with it. That's not a hard and fast rule; I'm partial to straight and silky, short or stubbly buzz cuts. Just a fantastic texture to fixate on, that's something I like," I clarified before going into other details as I wandered around the room in search of my punk Victorian costume.

Might as well be halfway fit for both probable locals… and the punk aspect would be useful for any athleticism required by the promise of a pursuant werewolf. "I tend to avoid over-users of products. Smells funny and tends to stick to my hands. Plus it takes them about seventy-five million years to get ready in the mornings and I'm just not willing to wait for the bathroom that long."

I pulled a distressed black waistcoat off of a rack. Double-breasted, almost fluffy in the way the material had started pill at almost every available opportunity, but still somewhat professional in the way the brass buttons shined. A definite yes.

"They should be decently built; my tastes tend towards a range between athletic or beefy, usually taller than I am, but again, not a hard and fast rule. I never complain about a pair of nice long legs. A modicum of intelligence preferred, but not in absence of kindness. _Cannot_ be an asshole beyond my ability to tolerate; a bit of bitchery for flavor is fine with me. Must like or at least tolerate cats."

I grinned as I saw something else familiar. I wasn't going to wear it, but hell if I couldn't give Rose Tyler a litmus test of survivability. I plucked the pullover from the rack and spun around, holding it against my chest. "Sense of humor… mandatory."

Rose snorted at the neon blue-yellow-and-red colored question-marked monstrosity. "I don't know why he has that. I don't know why _anyone_ would have that."

Wait until she saw the technicolor dream coat.

"Probably used to wear it when he was feeling particularly enigmatic," I said, stretching out the word to each individual syllable – in-egg-mah-tick –, though I gave it an appraising look. I was oddly fond of the thing, in spite of its natural unfashionability. "Not really my style, since I've chosen my mid-layer for the day, but I couldn't let this one slide by without comment."

"Maybe some other day, you'll be queen of the question marks."

Now that's an idea. Just let me find the suspenders, the 'monogramed' shirts, the umbrella, and the legendary underwear. The very idea of me going on adventures in the Doctor's boxers, revealing my unshaved legs for all to see was worth a giggle.

"Anyway, got better stuff to do than chortle about the fashion disasters of others," I said, tossing it back onto the rack from whence it came. "Dare I venture into leopard print or plaid? Or should I just go with a solid, shredded set?" I asked myself.

"Do what you want; I've got my own togs to sort out," Rose said as she bounced off to other areas of the massive wardrobe.

I flitted between the racks, the trousers turning up relatively little in the functionally distressed category. "Charcoal grey boot cut jeans, mild wear then, milady?" I asked the TARDIS.

I figured she was listening in some way or the other, because a pair matching that description was quick to come up only a few feet down the rack. I grabbed them, folding them over my arm with the other relatively uncomplicated parts of my outfit. I only needed one more thing…

A flash of dark green grabbed my attention.

Another of Eight's looks and what I recognized as his last. Not as soft and sumptuous as the velvet coat I'd worn earlier, but still a good texture. Suede or something like it, I figured as I brushed the material with my thumb. It didn't look quite right with the rest of my outfit, especially against my zebra-print converse, but maybe I'd trade those out for a different set for tonight.

"I don't imagine you'd have any silver shoes," I muttered.

She didn't, and I ended up trading out my sneakers for leathery ankle boots. Era-fit, comfortable, and sturdy enough to for some solid kicking if events came to that end… and I wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't.

A mirror allowed me to mess with my hair a bit. A medium short mess was gender neutral enough for my needs and easier enough to deal with a minimum of order. I smoothed the mess down and it sprang up again, only slightly more tamed for the action.

Well, theoretically.

While most of the oil from the last adventure had stayed in, the dust we'd run into had unstuck most of it, leaving a vaguely greasy look behind. Well, it wasn't frizzy and the overall look was simply one of dishevelment, rather than a poor imitation of a drowned rat. I'd made that mistake once and I was no eager to repeat it.

Still, there were enough little clues – like my total lack of an Adam's apple – to give away my physical sex, but I was relying on having enough of a Force presence left to make a rudimentary SEP field around the finer details of my nature. If I could play empath through the limiter, I could make someone go 'meh' on the hazy shit.

I wasn't much in the mood for being told to stay in the kitchen tonight… or was it today? Time was odd inside a time machine.

Finally satisfied with my look, I caught up with Rose at the entrance of the wardrobe and we gave each other the once-over.

I was wearing the trash version of a three piece outfit, the Eighth's dark green coat over the black distressed vest and dark grey thin cut jeans. I'd traded the rumpled starched collar of last night for something minutely more relaxed and tied a coppery paisley tapestry scarf around my neck in a lazy imitation of a cravat.

She was wearing a t-shirt and a miniskirt over ankle high boots, though opaque leggings did lend themselves to modesty… by twenty-first century standards. By Victorian measure, the fact that Rose Tyler had legs in evidence was wildly inappropriate.

"Little over-dressed aren't you?" she asked.

I pulled on the lapels of the coat, which I had decorated with a number of small silver pins that I'd found in a jewelry box. Most were non-descript and didn't have any particular shape or reason, but a number were chain type pins traced their way up to my shoulder for a sufficiently punk look in my book. If worse came to worse, the werewolf would choke on them if when it ate me. "Better to be over than under. We are aiming for November, after all."

"Climate's different where you're from?" she asked.

"Michigan can get snow by the end of October and even barring that, it's usually mandatory coat weather before September is out. Not that it bothers me," I said with a shrug, "since I'm naturally adapted to such temperatures, but it's still a good idea to go out prepared. Besides that point, I just don't feel _comfortable_ without pockets."

Rose raised an eyebrow at me. "Natural slouch, aren't you?"

I looked down, noticing that my hands had tucked themselves into my coat pockets almost of their own accord. "Oh yeah. Drove my dad nuts."

"Yeah? What was he like?"

How could I sum up twenty years of a mentally, emotionally, and occasionally physically abusive relationship in six words or less?

"Jerk with a weak right hook," I said, even as I fingered my jaw. It had hurt like hell when it had happened and the memory still stung more than ten thousand years after the event, but even though I was only eight or nine years old and he was six foot one and a hundred pounds heavier than me, he hadn't even managed to bruise me.

But that might have been the point.

Ah, who cares, I thought as I shoved him out of my head. He might not be dead, thanks to the way my universe-hopping existence worked, but he certainly was dead to me.

We returned to the console room in silence, where the Doctor was waiting without a single alteration to his own look.

"Well," Rose asked, giving a little spin. "What do you think?"  
It was a cute look. Overall mini-skirt, low-cut printed t-shirt… it was about as wholesome as you could get from a punk look.

"1979, you could have gotten away with wearing a bin bag," he quipped before taking a look at me. "And you, Delaine…"

I held out my arms to show off my outfit.

He blinked as he took in the coat, but apparently thought better of the comment. Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action. I only had two strikes, so unless I came out wearing the technicolor dream coat on our next outing, I was relatively safe from the 'have you done this before' speech.

Unless this could just be chalked up to me liking the color green. Which was true. I'd always liked green and velvet.

"…you look alright," he finished lamely.

I dropped my arms.

Nice.

* * *

Something felt… good about today. Given, the Doctor felt good about solving the Graske problem and just being himself in general, but there was a promising feeling about the imminent future.

"1979! Hell of a year. China invades Vietnam, the Muppet Movie – love that film –, Margret Thatcher," the Doctor shuddered with a dramatic 'ugh' thrown in for color, "Skylab falls to Earth, with a little help from me. Nearly took off my thumb."

The Doctor opened the TARDIS doors without looking, still walking and talking as he watched the expressions of his two companions. Rose was smiling cheerily and Delaine… well, she looked alert and curious. That was a sort of happy, he supposed.

"I like my thumb, awfully attached to…"

A number of guns cocked, and as the Doctor looked down at least ten different barrels and a horse, he realized that this _probably_ wasn't Sheffield, 1979. Not unless there were was some sort of hard-core reenactment punk group shuffling around the late Seventies… with time itself on their side.

"…my thumb. Great," he muttered to himself, feeling the good feeling curdle up and die, "1879, only a hundred years off. Should really figure out where that randomizer got off to."

"You will explain your presence," the mounted soldier said through a thick Scottish burr, "and the… nakedness of this girl."

Rose glanced down at herself and the Doctor was somehow thankful for the fact that none of the soldiers seemed to realize that his other companion was also female. Maybe Delaine's penchant for suits and layers was coming in handy. That, or her gravelly voice was ambiguous enough to be interpreted either way.

Oh wait, she hadn't spoken yet. Well, said gravelly voice wouldn't shoot the deception dead in the water at least.

"We're in Scotland?" Rose asked.

"Where else would you be?" the soldier asked.

"Sheffield–" she began to say before Delaine reached over to grab her by the shoulder.

"Please excuse her," the brunette said smoothly, "Poor girl was afflicted by brain fever as a child, never quite recovered. Forgets where she is, her manners, and herself upon occasion. Had to chase her half round the moor before we caught up with her."

"Oh, ya," the Doctor said, smoothly shucking the Estuary coat off to glide into his Scottish accent, "Over hill and over dale, we've been trying to keep this wee child from embarrassin' the good name of her family. Isn't that right, ya timorous beastie?"

"Och, aye! I've been oot and aboot."

Oh no, that was worse than Delaine's 'Bigger On The Inside' speech. At least she had been imitating one specific Scot, not a stereotype. "Don't do that."

"Hoots, mon," she said, doing it again.

Companions were entirely overrated. He should have just picked up Jamie. No companions but Jamie and Leela, over and over again. Infinitely easier to deal with than people who had ideas about _accents_. "No, really, don't."

"Identify yourself, sirs," the soldier said, apparently satisfied with Rose's lack of wits.

Delaine gave a short, stiff bow at the waist, never looking away from the gun barrels pointed at them. "Delaine Graham Neil, late of the United States and assistant of the good Doctor here."

At least _someone_ wasn't pretending to have an accent they didn't come by honestly.

"Doctor James McCrimmon from the township of Balamory," the Doctor said, tilting his head towards his official 'assistant', "I can vouch for the lad, and I have my credentials right here with me, if I may present them." The mounted soldier nodded, allowing the Doctor to reach into his pocket and as he held up the psychic paper for all the soldiers to look at, he continued.

"As you can see, a Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. I trained under Doctor Bell himself."

Technically not a lie, though it was more than a few centuries back in his own timeline and for reasons slightly more _fannish_ than updating his understanding of human medicine. Ah, what the humans didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

"Let them approach."

The Doctor knew that voice. He was nearly certain he knew it.

"I'm not sure that's wise, ma'am," the soldier said.

"Let them approach," the woman in the carriage said again, this time with the touch of emphasis that said 'you will do as I say' as clearly as daylight.

Yes, he had a feeling that he knew exactly who was in that unassuming black carriage.

"You will approach the carriage," the soldier said calmly, though he never stopped pointing his gun at them, "and show all due deference."

The Doctor led the way, Rose and Delaine following him closely as they drew closer to the carriage. A footman, almost conspicuous in the fact that he was unarmed and dressed in full black compared to the red-coated soldiers all around, opened the door to the carriage.

The Queen looked older than he remembered. Fair, considering the last time he'd seen her… yes, the coronation. She'd only been eighteen and he'd been infinitely younger himself, but even forty years later, her eyes were still bright and piercing.

"Rose, Delaine, allow me to introduce her Majesty Queen Victoria, Empress of India and Defender of the Faith."

The two girls bowed.

"Rose Tyler, ma'am. And my apologies for being so naked," Rose said.

Delaine seemed to be doing her best not to scream. They didn't cover the sort of etiquette that pertained to royalty in America, he supposed. Maybe a little coaching was in order, but it was a little late for that.

"I've had five daughters; it is nothing to me," Victoria said briskly before turning her gaze on him. "But you, Doctor. Show me those credentials."

He handed over the psychic paper and hoped – not desperately, the Doctor saved desperate for special occasions – that it didn't show her anything inconvenient.

The Queen looked down at it and blinked as she 'read' over whatever her mind produced. "Well why didn't you say so earlier?"

Because, despite certain tricks and appearances to the contrary, the Doctor wasn't a mind reader. Not unless that mind happened to be very loud, on a similar wavelength to his own – to date, exactly none –, or he happened to have some form of physical contact to make up the difference.

"It says here that you have been appointed by the Lord Provost as my protector," she continued.

Does it? "Yes it does." Good, good. Protector. Yes, he could work with that. Could be uneventful but… the Doctor knew better than to expect uneventful from anything. "Then let me ask – why is Your Majesty travelling by road when there is a train all the way to Aberdeen?"

"A tree on the line."

"An accident?" he asked.

"I am the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland," she said dryly, "Everything around me tends to be planned."

"You suspect an assassination attempt," the Doctor said. It was no great surprise, what with her track record, except that this attempt wasn't recorded in any source he was aware of. No, McLean was still three years off and Fenn-Cooper had never followed through.

"Harder to defend a carriage than a train. Not as fast, can't be as heavily armored," Delaine added before scanning the empty horizon. "No apparent snipers – very little in the way of cover –, but if your enemies knows the lay of the land and where the carriage is liable to stop, an ambush can be planned."

"Do they teach such things in the Colonies?" the Queen asked, her attention seizing on the young American, who, to her credit, didn't even flinch.

"Not commonly, ma'am, but a little imagination, a large share of experience, and a thimble-full of paranoia can serve to make up the difference," Delaine said rather smoothly for someone on the cusp of panic only a few minutes ago. "And as I've heard it said – it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you."

Maybe it was just easier not to be bothered by an intimidating social divide when given leave to speak about a subject that she knew something about – the problem was that the subject in question was 'assassination'.

"A good philosophy. I am quite used to staring down the barrel of a gun and would likely do so more often if not for the forethought of my retinue," Victoria said.

The mounted soldier from before returned. "Sir Robert MacLeish lives but ten miles hence. We've sent word ahead. He'll shelter us for tonight, then we can reach Balmoral tomorrow."

"This Doctor, his assistant, and his timorous beastie will come with us."

"Yes, Ma'am. We'd better get moving - it's almost nightfall."

"Indeed. And there are stories of wolves in these parts. Fanciful tales intended to scare the children. But good for the blood, I think. Drive on!"

The Doctor fell into step behind the carriage, his companions at his heel. Yes, the good feeling from before had thoroughly dispersed, leaving only a sense of curiosity in its wake. Well, so far as he was concerned, the two were closely related.

"When you think of assassinations, you think of Kennedy. Not her," Rose said after a minute.

"It's because it's easy to remember the ones that succeed. Lincoln, McKinley, Ferdinand… now that was bad luck. Killed on account of a sandwich," Delaine said. "Garfield was a bad one. Shot in July, took him three months to die… less on account of the bullet, more on account of none of his doctor's washing their hands while they poked around for it."

Now that was a lovely image and a good reminder of why he liked Joseph Lister so much.

"Wait, wait," Rose interrupted, "killed on account of a sandwich?"

"Well, so the story goes, it was a comedy of errors… or it would have been, had it not been what it was. The Doctor probably knows the real story, but unless he's willing to chime in–"

"No, no," the Doctor said, "go on. I want to hear how you tell it."

"Well, let's just say that tensions between Serbia and Austria were a little tense at the time," Delaine began. "The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were visiting Serbia…"

If anything else, it would be an interesting way to spend the next ten minutes or so. If only, the Doctor thought to himself again, the subject of conversation wasn't 'assassination'…

* * *

Sir Robert looked like a man with a noose around his neck.

It was easy to see why. For all the man seemed like he was choking on every lie that stumbled past his lips, the members of his staff – all conspicuous in both their baldness and the ill-fit of their obviously borrowed suits – were cool, cold, and watchful.

Proper assassins, if not properly professional, I decided, as I picked out the leader from the razor sharp stares he kept prompting Sir Robert's pathetic attempts at deception with. Not typically the sort that went after figures of great import, but the kind that had a cause that could be paid for in blood. Cultists of some variation. No passion, no feeling… merely the mission and their god. And the mission permitted Sir Robert's loyalty to his wife be exploited against his loyalty to Queen and country.

Even disregarding that major portion of the scenario, there was the matter of 'the property'. A small locked box, no bigger than a book. In a different universe or era, I would have said information or some jewel of great power. But this universe didn't believe in magic and USB drives were not around yet. So something small but valuable to justify two guards to escort it to a suitable resting place.

A jewel? Alien technology that would prove the seed of Torchwood's own collection? Something infinitely more mysterious… or infinitely more stupid?

I shared a glance with the Doctor. I had a feeling he picked up on it, but if he would treat the fishy atmosphere with anything different from the flippancy I remembered from the episode, I couldn't say.

Instead, I gave my attention to the Torchwood estate.

It was an impressive house, the sort of manor that could have served as backdrop to the Hounds of the Baskervilles, even if my imagination had always painted the ceilings higher and the windows taller. Surrounded by the great emptiness of the moor… well, from a storytelling perspective, it was an ideal location for a horror story.

But that wasn't what really got me.

What got me was how empty it was. The residential rooms, the library, the study, the dining hall… no matter where we went, not a single member of the staff was in evidence. There were only the bald assassins. I could appreciate the advantage of plants, but to replace every member of the staff so sloppily? The very absence of maids and a cook should have been at least remarked upon, but no. Nobody but me and maybe the Doctor seemed to notice the discrepancy.

Absurdism in action.

Despite my annoyance and misgivings with the entire situation, I couldn't help but smile as our tour of the estate entered the astronomy room and I saw the model. The solar system as known in this time, modeled in brass and bronze. Dust-covered and obviously neglected, but someone had loved it at some time. The music of the spheres, the rotation of the cosmos had sung in someone's soul here.

"This, I take it," Victoria said, calling my attention to another point in the room, "is the famous Endeavour."

Ah. I'd ignored the telescope, despite its size and the dull shine of the bronze, mostly because it hadn't been as outwardly interesting as the planetary model. But yes, it drew the eye, as did its muffled aura of hope, curiosity, and… latent fear wrought into it. Even with my limiter on, I couldn't escape that muffled sense of urgency that had been worked into every rivet.

"All my father's work," Robert said, almost sadly and without the verbal stumble that had plagued his every answer before this. "Built by hand in his final years. Became something of an obsession. He spent his money on this rather than caring for the house or himself."

Ah. There was a reason for that fear soaked into the metal. A need for it to be finished before he died, desperation demanding that all else be put on the backburner to see this 'telescope' – somehow I doubted it was what it appeared to be at face value – finished to his specifications.

"Sounds like a very interesting man. I wish I could have met him," the Doctor said, echoing my thoughts before pointing at it. "If I may?"

"Help yourself," Sir Robert said as the Doctor leaned down the look anyway.

I took a look at the design, half-wishing I could do a decent Structural Analysis. Alas for my 'vacation' from supernatural powers. "What did he model it on?" I asked.

"Oh, I know nothing about it. To be perfectly honest, most of us thought him merely… eccentric." Sir Robert's uneasy smile collapsed into honest grief. "I… wish now that I'd spent more time with him, listened to his stories."

"This is a bit rubbish," The Doctor leaned up from the eyepiece, scratching the back of his head. "Where ever he was going with this design, he used way too many prisms. Also, the magnification is way off base for what you'd want for a telescope. No good for stargazing. Whatever he was going for, I can't even – am I being rude?"

Rose bit her lip. "A bit, yeah."

"But it is beautiful," he continued, "A masterwork of design… even if I cannot _begin_ to tell you the exact function it was built for."

"For surveying the infinite work of God. What greater function could man build any device for?" the Queen said, "Sir Robert's father was an example to us all. A polymath, steeped in astronomy and sciences, yet equally well versed in folklore and fairytales."

"Stars and magic. A man after my own hearts," the Doctor murmured.

"Must have had many a story to tell," I agreed.

"My late husband loved his stories dearly. Prince Albert acquainted himself with many of the local legends, but no-one had quite the talent for telling them as Sir George," Queen Victoria recounted, her eyes falling away to some far-away place, "Particularly the tales of the local wolf. Albert was positively transported by those."

Oh, yes. There was our plot. The wolf that wore the human skin but wanted a crown to match.

"So what's this about a wolf?" the Doctor asked, diverting his attention to Sir Robert.

The assassins attention sharpened and the mood of the room chilled.

Sir Robert was afraid again. "It's just a story," he said.

Lie. It wasn't 'just as story'. There was truth there and a truth that the assassins were interested in keeping obscured. Weren't they a cult of some description or simply using the werewolf as a source of social power? I couldn't quite remember.

There had been a werewolf, of ostensibly alien origin. On that and the absolute fact that Rose Tyler could be the most annoying creature in any given room, I was certain. People had died, Rose Tyler had annoyed, and Queen Victoria had not been amused.

Anything more than that, I had nothing. So, anything, even 'just a story', would help.

Not that I wouldn't be turning my own wits towards the end, I thought as I assigned myself the mission of keeping as many people alive as possible.

"I'm always in the mood for a well-spun yarn," the Doctor said.

"Ah… well, so it's said –"

"Excuse me, sir," The lead assassin interrupted. He had cold eyes, I noted. Nothing on the surface and very little behind. "Perhaps her Majesty's party could retire to their rooms. It is almost dark."

Almost. Key word. They would wait until dark to attack. The wolf wouldn't be able to transform until night, unless it was operating far out of the bounds of my experience.

"Ah, yes. Of course," Sir Robert demurred, "I forgot in my excitement that yours has been a long day. My apologies for the presumption, ma'am."

"We can discuss the tale over supper, Sir Robert," the Queen said before giving Rose a sideway glance. "Could some clothes be found for Miss Tyler? I tire of her nakedness."

"Yes, my wife…" Sir Robert's voice quavered slightly on the point before he steeled himself. "My wife left some things behind. They should be of a near size."

The pieces that I'd been dully aware of before this came into focus like a puzzle falling into place.

His wife was being held hostage. Somewhere close enough for any wrong move on his part could mean her demise quickly. She was likely being kept near where they kept their wolf, to make the threat all the more visceral.

Don't play along, and the big bad wolf will gobble her up. Do as we say, and you both might survive the coming night. The only price will be your honor and everything attached.

She nodded. "See to it then. We shall dine at seven and speak more of this wolf. After all, there is a full moon tonight."  
"So it is, ma'am," Sir Robert said with a leery look to the sky. "So it is."

Well, if anything, this story made full use of all available themes.

A werewolf attacking a manor on the moor on the night of a full moon, with the Queen, mysterious assassins, and an unknown something stored away under guard. And in all of that, the number of people capable of pulling a good ending out of the scenario could be counted on one hand removed of half its fingers.

I gave the 'telescope' one last look before we were shuffled off to other areas of the house. Yes, that was important.

If I could only remember _why_.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, man.
> 
> I wanted to get a certain word count per chapter, but this one refused to be padded out any further than it already was. Oh well. I was planning on this one being a multi-chapter event anyway (how many, idk, we'll see how it falls).
> 
> Part of what's taking so long to update is that it has honestly been a while since I've watched any of Series 2 (and I really don't care for it). Even though I'm not Rose or Ten's biggest fan, I am trying not to throw either character under the bus... unless they've earned it. //shrug
> 
> Did a little corrections, because I finished and posted this when I was exhausted (I remember questioning if I even understood English at the moment). Only a few were needed though.


	5. Chapter 5

Against all the promises of a 'vacation', I'd loosened the limiter. Not enough to put on a proper show, no, I wouldn't be sharing any fireworks displays for a while yet, but I would be slightly sturdier than the average human. And a lot less susceptible to poisons.

What could I say? I'd played the part of assassin enough in theory and practice to know the playbook. Poison was easier, especially if you were feeling particularly vindictive… or indiscriminate.

Unfortunately, I was on my least favorite side of these kinds of scenarios; playing the role of the diner.

And the fact that this was a semi-social meal with that actual Queen of England – at least in this era –, well, there was a bit of pressure, but at least it didn't look like they were going to bring out the ridiculously extravagant silverware.

I cut carefully at the ham served, all while keeping an eye on everyone one else at the table. A simple meal, with little room for error or enjoyment. Had the assassins killed the cook or simply tucked them away with the rest of the staff?

Maybe I was being overcritical and getting caught up in minutiae. Stress didn't do me any favors, especially when all I had to deal with it were the ghosts of other pasts telling me that things had been far worse than this on many other occasions.

"Your companion begs an apology, Doctor," the leader of the assassins said with a shallow bow, "Her clothing has somewhat _delayed_ her."  
"Oh, that's alright," the Doctor said, "Save her a wee bit of ham."

I watched the vulturine man join the rest of his men at the wall, all of them watching the meal with little interest, confident, in their own way, that their plan would go off without hitch. How would they react as it fell to pieces?  
"Feral as her ways are, she's likely to eat it raw," Victoria said.

Captain Reynolds gave a small bark of laughter, only to deflate as his Queen pinned him with a look. Ah. A kindred spirit in failing at social events.

"Mmm, we're trying to break those sort of habits, ma'am," I said as I chewed on my own piece. Tender, if nothing else. "It's hardly healthy, much less fit use for such fine _silver_ ware as this."

It was silver, pure if my eye was good – was it ever not? I quickly shoved the question into a mental closet –, and though it was the sort that got passed down and polished over generations, this was relatively new.

Ah, the Victorian age. So fantastic… yet so irritating if you didn't understand and play off of the various nuances just so. Well, I doubted many would complain if this filigree all ended up shoved into the vital areas of a werewolf, especially if it saved their lives.

"Come, Sir Robert," the Doctor said, setting down his silverware with a relatively loud clang in the awkward silence of the room. "I believe you promised us a story! Come, sir, share the tale of darkness and nightmares you so teased us with earlier."

Victoria's eyes lit up at the reminder. "Indeed," she said, almost hungrily, "Since my husband's death, I find myself with more a taste for supernatural fiction."  
"You must miss him," the Doctor said.

The light dimmed. "Very much," she said quietly before picking her chin up again, "but that's the beauty of a ghost story, is it not? Not the scares or the chills; those are enough for children. But the hope of contact with the beyond... we all want some message from that place. But the dead stay silent and we must wait. As is God's will."

An odd look came over the Doctor's face. Sobriety didn't suit him well; compared to the manic light he had in his eyes earlier when presented with a curiosity, he almost looked broken.

Well, that's what he was, wasn't he? Even with all the help Rose Tyler had been able to give in opening him up to the universe again, the Doctor was broken. You couldn't go through something like the Time War and executing the apparent genocide of your own species without losing something inside. Not unless you never had it to begin with.

My musings were interrupted by the Queen leaning forward, all the bright interest of a child easily readable on her face. "Come. Begin your tale, Sir Robert. There's a chill in the air. The wind is howling through the eaves. The stage is set and your audience awaits; now, tell us of monsters."

Sir Robert gathered himself, and while the stress didn't melt away from his shoulders like I'd seem with some natural story tellers, he did seem calmer as he prepared to share the story that served as both backdrop and backstory to our evening.

"The story goes back three hundred years," he began. "Every full moon, the howling rings around the valley. The next morning, livestock is found ripped apart and devoured."

"Thieves have used the excuse before, to disguise the true nature of their deeds," Captain Reynolds scoffed, "Steal a sheep, blame a wolf. Simple as that."

The Queen gave him a sideways glance, clearly annoyed with the interruption.

"You'd think in that case they'd pick an animal that isn't _extinct_ in the islands," I said quietly. They didn't have any major predators left, since they'd hunted the bears and the wolves to extinction decades, if not _centuries_ ago.

"Oh, the odd tale of wolves crops up every few years. Feral dogs most of the time, when they aren't outright lies," Sir Robert conceded before shifting the story back onto its rails, "But… wolves are not bound by the cycles of the moon. Wolves do not have the wit to break into homesteads and steal a child without waking any other soul within. And this is what gives the tale veracity. Because we have the records, dating back all those three hundred years. One child stolen on the night of the full moon every generation, never to be found again, dead or alive."

"Are there descriptions of the creature?" the Doctor asked. His interest wasn't the same as the other listeners; Victoria's fascination with the spun tale, Reynold's vague annoyance with the sheer ridiculousness of the yarn, the boredom of the assassins who already knew.

The Doctor knew monsters. Vampires, Daleks, Cybermen, Yeti, undead of untold description. Werewolves were just one more, but not one that he'd met often… or at all, depending on what was 'canon'.

Sir Robert nodded. "Oh, yes, Doctor. Woodcarvings, drawings, word of mouth, both passed down and recorded. And they do not record a simple beast. No, something… more than that."

He cast a glance at the full moon above, just visible through a high window. It was a bright and scintillating glow, interrupted only by the slightest wisp of a cloud. Our fuzzy friend would be making himself known soon.

"Those that have seen it swear that for all it is _like_ a wolf, it does not walk like one. And a few… a few sightings speak of a transformation. From man to beast and back again."

The snapping of bones, reformation of cartilage, the burn of flesh melting like wax as something new crawled out of what was me, all the instincts of the wild hooking their claws into my soul –

"A werewolf," Sir Robert finished.

I blinked, bringing myself back to the present. No, there would be no shapeshifting or skinchanging on my part tonight. Not unless things got really out of hand. And they wouldn't.  
"That is quite the tale, Sir Robert," the Queen said, "Tis good that it is but that; a tale."

"Ah, but my father did not believe it so. He said it was fact. He even claimed to have encountered the beast once. Communed with it and learned its purpose. I should have listened but his work was… hindered. He made enemies in his investigation. The inhabitants of an old monastery in the Glen of Saint Catherine, to be exact. They call themselves… the Brethren."

The assassins tensed slightly and there was a humming in the distance. No, not a hum. A chant… or a prayer. It slowly spread, the assassins in the room whispering it under their breath.

"Perhaps they thought his work ungodly," Victoria said.

Lupus deus est.

"I'd thought that as well, once. But I've since learned better of it," Sir Robert said bitterly, "They turned from the ways of God long ago."

The wolf is the god.

This game has gone on long enough.

"Shall we dispense with pretense?" I said, rising from my chair, "I'm rather tired of playing along."

"Oh, so you _have_ been keeping up," the Doctor said, "I wondered."

Captain Reynolds had risen as well, producing his gun and training it on the lead assassin. The assassin didn't turn around, instead continuing his 'prayer' to the moon.

"What is the meaning of this?" the Queen demanded.

"I'm sorry, Your Majesty, they've got my wife," Sir Robert said.

"Go find Rose and the hostages –" I said.

The Doctor and Sir Robert bolted into the hall as an unholy scream tore through the house, the sound going from the high squeal of a human in agony to the howl of something infinitely more bestial.

Our werewolf was on its way.

* * *

 

The Doctor ran, following the screams. Rose was somewhere nearby, likely locked up with the werewolf. As much as he wanted to know what it was, he wasn't ready to sacrifice a companion for his curiosity. Especially not Rose.

That wasn't acceptable.

Delaine would be fine with the Queen. She could handle herself. He was sure of it.

Another round of screams, these ones human and close. Rose? Yes, among others.

The Doctor barely paused before kicking down the door.

Twenty or so hostages, including Rose, had managed to tear their chain from the wall, and all were flooding towards another door. The one furthest away from the cage and the writhing form of the creature within.

"Oh my God," Sir Robert breathed in horror as he saw it.

"Where the hell have you been?" Rose yelled.

The werewolf spasmed again, bones snapping and crackling as its arms lengthened and its shoulders widened. Fur was sprouting from its pale flesh, the light fuzz thickening into a darker, thicker pelt.

"Oh, that's just lovely," the Doctor murmured.

What was it? Something that reacted to light. Moonlight, specifically. Oh, but there were so many species modulated by different wavelengths. 'Moonlight' only counted for so much when any given moon could be made of any different combination of materials, reflecting the light of a sun burning so many different elements.

"Come on, go! Get out!"

Well, with enough time and enough resources to work with, he might be able to narrow it down…

"Doctor!"

The werewolf hooked its long clawed fingers into the bars as it swelled, taking up every inch of available cage before it ripped the door off of its hinges and threw it at the Doctor.

He ducked and spun around to the door, slamming it behind him and pulling out the sonic screwdriver to seal the lock before running after the rest of the group. How long it would hold up against a werewolf… well, the Doctor would just have to see.

Guns were being distributed and there was seemingly a piece for every man there. For all there were only a handful, it was still more than the Doctor saw in an average English week.

"Arms, and you five!" a man – probably the steward – said, grabbing the last gun for himself, "Ready? Lady Isobel, take the women to the kitchen and out to safety."

Isobel grabbed her husband, cupping his face in her hands. "I can't leave you. What will you do?"

Sir Robert kissed her before pulling away. "I must defend her Majesty. Now, don't think of me, just go."

She went and the Doctor turned to Rose. "The werewolf. Did it say what it wanted?" he asked as he undid her shackles.

"The Queen, the Crown, the throne - you name it," she said, rubbing her wrists to get back circulation, "It thinks it can take over the world. Make itself an empire."

Well. At least for all the creature was new, its motivations weren't… even if that's not how it really worked. Three hundred years since it landed and it had apparently made no effort of understanding of current politics.

There was a crash in the hall.

The Doctor looked, though he already had some idea of what it was.

The now fully transformed werewolf stood there, sniffing at the air.

"The werewolf," the steward breathed from just behind him.

The Doctor couldn't stop himself.

"The there wolf," he said, pointing at the beast.

It fixed its silvery eyes on them and snarled.

"Running!" the Doctor said as he did exactly that, grabbing Rose and dragging her away from the guns. Gunfire rang out behind them and the werewolf snarled.

"Fire!" the steward yelled again. There was another haphazard volley and the sound of claws scrabbling on wood and stone. Smoke filled the room, obscuring the sight of a theoretically empty hallway.

"Alright, you men. We need to retreat upstairs," the Doctor said, "Follow me."

The steward scoffed. "Why? The battle is done. No mere beast could hope to stand up to such an assault. There's no such creature on God's Earth."

The Doctor already had a list of purely terrestrial beasts that could, but thought better of bringing up the subject of an elephant. But this werewolf wasn't a mere beast, much less one of Earthly origin. He somehow doubted that mere bullets would stop it.

"I'm telling you to come upstairs!" he yelled.

"And I'm telling you, sir, that I will sleep like a babe tonight with that thing's hide up on my wall," the steward snapped back.

The gunsmoke had cleared slightly, providing a sort of evidence that the creature was not dead. Oh, there was blood – a dark, almost black spatter – but it was too light and irregular to be the mark of death, and it was clear to see that most of the bullets had missed their mark, instead burying themselves in the wall.

"Must have crawled away to di–"

Claws reached down from the ceiling in a flash, dragging the man to his death. An arm, divorced of its former owner, fell to the floor with a heavy wet slap, breaking the spell of shock that had fallen over the other men.

"Run!" the Doctor yelled.

This time, the humans obeyed.

* * *

 

The assassins – now recognizable as monks, though I doubted the saffron robes were geographically appropriate or the mistletoe wreaths around their necks standard for any denomination – stood in the hall, some now armed with bolt action rifles. Martin-Henry's if I knew my guns and my military correctly.

Breech-loading, lever actuating, single shot.

Good. They had one bullet and an unbalanced bludgeon if they were smart. I doubted monks were well-versed in the art of gunplay, even if they were of a slightly more martial bent than to which I was accustomed in the breed.

Say what you will about fighting barehanded, but you rarely ever had to reload your fists.

The first fell without resistance, his neck twisted around without him even realizing that I was there. The rest, however, heard the sound of him falling to the ground. I took up the musket, slamming the nearest in the jaw with the butt before bringing it up to shoot another before he could shoot at me or my charges. He dropped as quickly as the first, a slug of lead cooling in his brain.

I shoved any discomfort out of my mind as the next loser came up. I threw the musket at him, knocking him backwards for a second. The moment of time was precious and I got my full price from it, kicking him in the solar plexus before he had a chance to react.

Hello. Goodbye.

Now, we were down to three, and they were smart enough to attempt team work.

Still, they were ten-thousand years too early.

The first punched at me and I twisted the monk's arm around easily, turning his own momentum against him. There was a moment of realization on his face before I dislocated his shoulder and bestowed him with a Glasglow Kiss. I stole his mistletoe necklace before I threw him to the side as I move on to the next, this time focusing my destructive potential on his knee, which crumbled just as easily as his composure as the monk fell to screaming before I punched him in the back of the head.

"You must be one of those westward ruffians I hear tell of," Victoria said, not with horror or shock as one might expect from someone who just witnessed the crippling of two men in as many seconds as it took to put on a coat, but as easily and matter-of-fact as an observation of the weather.

Well, she was the Queen, not to mention the woman who stone cold put down a man who'd threatened her life and empire. Part of me really wanted to like her, but familiarity was out-of-line. I would merely have to settle for respect.

"I was raised in the style, ma'am," John Wayne and Walker Texas Ranger counted, right? I shoved my elbow into the final monk's ribs, feeling them crack under the force of the blow before I spun around on my heel, snatching the mistletoe wreath from around his neck as he fell. A small bit of flair in an otherwise unornamented flurry of violence. "Don't really care for firearms myself."

Not as myself, though other incarnations used them, sometimes with pleasure. But this model, the most basic me? No. I'd never like guns. I'd recognize their use and have a respect for their power, but using one as a first recourse… no, that was not really my area.

Captain Reynolds glanced at the pile of bodies I'd left crumpled on the floor. "It doesn't seem you have much need of them," he said levelly.

Oh, I liked this guy. Practical, loyal, not at all ostentatious…

"Oh, range has its advantages," I said as I tossed the captain a wreath. Association pulled the satisfaction of pulling off a near impossible snipe to the forefront of my mind for a moment before I shoved it back. _Not now._ "And one uses the tools one is provided."

"That we do," the captain said as we followed the Queen upstairs to a safe room, where she withdrew a small case from the safe and emptied it into her purse.

As much as the idea of doing all that for whatever material thing was in the box irked me, I didn't say anything. The deed was done and I wasn't going to waste time arguing with the Queen of England over a trifle when the lives of others were at stake.

I followed her and Captain Reynolds down a staircase, trying to sense anything that remotely struck me as a threat. Nothing except the fear of the humans in residence. Damn.

"Your Majesty! Your Majesty!"

"Sir Robert? What is happening? There have been terrible noises."

The man took a deep breath. "The wolf, ma'am," Robert said, "It is here and it has taken at least one man tonight."

His eyes scanned the stairs. "Where is Father Angelo?"

"Disposed of," Victoria said coolly, "along with a number of his cohorts."

Sir Robert's eyes flicked to me and Captain Reynolds. Astute, if not entirely accurate.

"It's no good. The front door has been boarded shut," the Doctor said, running his hands back through his hair as he entered the room. He nodded to the Queen. "My apologies, Your Majesty, but you'll have to leg it through the window."

We retreated to the drawing room, towards the window that the Doctor had motioned to, and Sir Robert had slipped ahead of us. "Excuse my manners, Ma'am, but I shall go first, the better to assist Her Majesty's egress."

"A noble sentiment, my Sir Walter Raleigh," Victoria said.

The Doctor gave a look outside the room as the rest of the staff shuffled in, – no it couldn't be the rest of the staff. Merely the male half of it. "Yeah, any chance you could hurry up? There's a bit of a queue and a rather unpleasant customer hanging somewhere around the back."

Where was everyone else?

Sir Robert moved to open the window, only for the glass to explode in a shower of bullets.

The Doctor grimaced. "I reckon the monkey boys want us to stay inside with their little friend."

"Do they know who I am?"

Rose nodded, shock still written along the lines of her face and posture. "Yeah, that's why they want you. The wolf's lined you up for a – a biting."

"Stop this talk," the Queen said, "There can't be an actual wolf."

The howl that tore through the house, rendered all the more frightening for its seeming lack of source, cut short the protest. It echoed around the labyrinthine halls; haunting but all too real to be dismissed as anything less than 'an actual wolf'.

The sound of a door breaking was only punctuation on our need to get out.

"It's killed one man already, ma'am. Tore him to pieces right before my eyes," Sir Robert said, "I don't know how we can stop it. I don't know if there's even a way to."

"There's always a way," Rose said. "We just don't know what it is yet."

"Well, we don't have any silver on hand…" the Doctor said, "So… we run."

"Is that it?" Rose asked.  
"You got any better ideas?" he asked.

The Stupid Brain Goblin gave me the solution of setting the house on fire, but I quickly dismissed the plan on account of it coming from the Stupid Brain Goblin. Besides, the Queen was supposed to survive this debacle.

The crack in the door widened as a long, fang-filled snout popped through, teeth gnashing as the rest of it strained to follow it.

"Anyway, You Majesty, as a Doctor, I recommend a vigorous jog. Good for the health. Come on!"

Now was the trick of making sure she and, by extension, we, did.

* * *

 

Of all the places to be trapped, the Doctor rated a library as one of his favorites. He could do without the threat of imminent dismemberment, disembowelment, and death, but other than that and the fact that they'd left Captain Reynolds outside to the beast in exchange for the handful of seconds it took to get everyone else inside, he was fine.

The utterly exhausted look that was sinking further and further into Delaine's being as the sound of the soldier getting ripped limb from limb just outside the door was a reminder though. This wasn't a game and, as interesting as the werewolf was, it wasn't worth someone's life. The Doctor had to figure out what it was and how to stop it before it took another.

"Alright. What do we know about the monster?" he said, grabbing a book. Rudimentary astronomy, mostly focusing on the movement of constellations over the seasons. Interesting, somewhat wrong, but worthless at the moment. He tossed it aside.

"It's a werewolf," the Queen said almost numbly.

"It's after the Queen," Sir Robert added.

"It's alien and… feeds on moonlight," Rose said.

That was better. Better than 'Native Flora of the British Isles' and 'Cultivating Cultivar'.

"So our werewolf feeds on moonlight, like a sort of photosynthesis," the Doctor said, shoving the books back onto the shelf.

"Great, it's an exotic space plant," Delaine muttered.  
"Except plants don't tear people to pieces," a gardener said.

"Clearly, you've never encountered a Krynoid," the Doctor said as he flipped through another book – 'Secrets of the Kells' – before tossing it aside in disgust. There had to be a journal, a book safe, a note, something detailing something that Robert's father had stumbled upon that the Doctor could _use_.

"Doctor."

He was trying to do research, what did they want now? "What?" he asked.

"If the werewolf was able to tear down all those over doors..." Delaine asked, "why hasn't it done so here?"

Oh. OH.

The Doctor pressed his ear against the wall. Oh, it was still out there, breathing heavily and prowling, but it should have broken in by now. It was a mountain of muscle attached to claws and teeth. Inch thick doors wouldn't… _shouldn't_ have deterred it like this.

Heavy footsteps padded away with a clear snarl of disgust as the suspicion solidified.

"It's gone," the Doctor said. "That doesn't… that doesn't make _sense_."

There was something about the library that repelled it. They could hear it pacing around the outside, but it never touched the room, despite the ease with which it should have been able to break in.

So, for some reason, it couldn't get in.

On impulse, the Doctor licked the door.

"Viscum album oil worked into the varnish," he murmured as he slowly looked up in realization, "it's repelled by mistletoe."

"The monks were wearing mistletoe. I passed a garland over to Captain… Reynolds after," Delaine said, the words slowing, "after… he threw it away. Damn it."

The Doctor tried to ignore the sting of guilt at the reminder that not twenty feet away, a man had died to buy him – a Time Lord – some time. Deaths happened, some in the background, others closer to home, sometimes in moments of heroism, and sometimes for no reason at all. He couldn't change what happened, those were fixed points, but he could prevent more of them from happening.

"The mistletoe gives us some time. Not a lot, because it's smart enough to find a work around at some point, but we have some time," he said before turning to Sir Robert, "Time to find out what your father knew about this 'werewolf'."

* * *

 

Werewolf lore. Astronomy. Mistletoe. Astrology. Wolf's bane. Magic. Witch hunts. Agricultural guides.

"I've found… some sort of treatise on explosives," Sir Robert said uncertainly.

"That's good! That's the sort of thing," the Doctor said before he pulled free another book, a cloud of dust flying free of it as he opened it and started turning the pages. Ah, finally. "1540. Something fell to Earth."

"A falling star?" Victoria asked.

"A spaceship?" Rose asked.

"Both. Neither," the Doctor said as he scanned the page and began to read aloud, "'In the year of our Lord 1540, under the reign of King James the Fifth, an almighty fire did burn in the pit'. I'd say that's not far from your Glen of Saint Catherine's Monastery."

"That's right," Sir Robert said, "Not even a full hour's ride."

"Three hundred years, what's it been doing?" Rose asked.

"Waiting, growing, plotting. If it is what I'm starting to think it is, it probably needed the time to recover from its journey and adapt to humanity," the Doctor said, shutting the book. "This is just the step of its plan before profit. Taking over the Queen."

"I'd sooner die than grant this creature victory," the Queen said.

"Your Majesty…"

"No, Sir Robert. I would not see this creature despoil the empire I was given charge of. But that is no matter," she said, reaching into her purse, "I only ask that you find some place of safekeeping for something far older and more precious than myself."

Before any question about what material good could be worth more than the life of a Queen, she pulled out a diamond.

It wasn't massive, only the size of a flattened fig, but it was brilliant and only someone completely and utterly ignorant of the Crown Jewels wouldn't recognize it.  
"Is that the Koh-I-Noor?" Rose asked.  
"Oh, yes," the Doctor said, "The Mountain of Light."  
"Given to me as the spoils of war. Perhaps its legend is now coming true," the Queen said, rolling the diamond over in her hand, "It is said that whoever owns it must surely die."

"Well, that's true of anything if you own it long enough," the Doctor said, tilting his head to look at it. Oh, he'd never quite get over how it seemed to eat up the light from the right angle, "Why do you travel with it?"

"My annual pilgrimage," she said, "I'm taking it to Helier and Carew, the Royal Jewellers at Hazelhead. The stone needs recutting."

"But it's perfect," Rose said.  
Victoria shook her head. "My late husband never thought so. He always said the shine wasn't quite right. But he died with it still unfinished."  
"Unfinished. Oh, yes," the Doctor said, looking down at the last book he'd pulled from the shelf. He didn't bother opening it. No answers would be forthcoming from Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius. "There's a lot of unfinished business in this house. His father's research, and your husband, ma'am, he came here and he sought the perfect diamond."

Something clicked together and the Doctor snapped his fingers. "Hold on, hold on. All these separate things, they're not separate at all, they're connected. Oh, my head, my head. What if this house, it's a trap for you. Is that right, ma'am?"  
"Obviously."

Some plaster dust fell from the ceiling. The Doctor dismissed it. He'd solved the riddle, dust was a tertiary concern. "At least, that's what the wolf intended. But, what if there's a trap inside the trap?"

"Doctor," Rose said. She was looking up.

"I'm getting to the point," the Doctor said, throwing up a hand to stall any further protests, "What if his father and your husband weren't just telling each other stories. They dared to imagine all this was true, and they planned against it, laying the real trap not for you, but for the wolf."

"Doctor, look up."

The Doctor looked up at the grinning shadow that straddled the skylight. "That wolf there."

The werewolf punched the glass, which splintered as more plaster dust rained down on the group.

"Out! Out! Out!"

The last body scrambled out of the library as the werewolf broke through the ceiling and the Doctor slammed the door shut.

"That won't hold for long. Right, the rest of you; get out through the kitchens. It knows what it's after; it won't follow you," he ordered before turning to the Queen. "Your Majesty, we'll be heading for the astronomy room. I think I know what Sir George and your husband had planned."

Victoria looked uncertain for a moment, but the sound of the werewolf thumping against the closed door was all the motivation she needed to nod in agreement.

"Let's finish this."

* * *

 

There were few moments in my existence that had afforded such satisfaction as the moment when the werewolf took a face full of boiling mistletoe soup. It collapsed on itself for a moment, shrieking in pain as its flesh sizzled, before running down the hall away from everyone.

Good.

"Isobel!" Robert breathed as he embraced his wife.

"I was so worried," she said as their kiss ended.

"Get back downstairs, Isobel."

"Keep yourself safe," she said, even as she took a step back, the crowd of maids that followed her already going back to the relative safety of the kitchens. "Promise me, Robert."

"Go, Isobel."

The Doctor and the Queen were almost to the observatory, only pausing once to spare a glance to the small drama going on behind them.

"Come on!" the Doctor called as the sound of scrabbling claws returned down the hall. I grabbed two decorative swords from the wall, shoving Sir Robert through the door as the werewolf approached.

The beast looked awful, half of its face deprived of fur and glistening a blistery red. If it wasn't a murderous monster, I would have almost felt sorry for it. But kicking the door shut in its face and hearing it bounce off and apparently fall all the way back down the stairwell was funny as shit.

Considering it was the only funny thing that had really happened all day, I made a point to remember it.

I slid the swords through the door handles. "That'll buy us a few seconds."

"That'll have to be enough," the Doctor said as he fiddled with the machinery of the Endeavour. "Your Majesty, the diamond."

"For what purpose?" she asked.

"The one for which it was specifically cut."

Victoria pulled the Koh-I-Noor from her purse and the Doctor took it, placing it into a slot in the Endeavour. "Rose, Delaine, Robert; help me get this into position!"

"A fine time for stargazing!" Rose snapped as she took up position at the gear.

"It's not a telescope; it's a light chamber. It takes moonlight, amplifies it, and focuses it to a laser point," he explained.

"The wolf lives on moonlight… you intend to drown him with it," Robert said with a faint awe. He probably didn't understand half of the nomenclature in the Doctor's sentence, but had seized upon the point instantly.

"Yes! Seems you've got your father's brains knocking about in there somewhere," the Doctor said before focusing on the task of getting the angle just right. "Come on, come on…"

The door buckled as the wolf slammed into it, but the swords held, though they rattled in the door handles. A bright spot of moonlight, easily as bright as the sun, appeared on the floor.

"There we are!" the Doctor crowed, just as the werewolf busted down the door, sending shards of wood and sword flying. It roared and leaned back to strike at the Queen, but the Doctor picked up one of the hilts and slid to where the point of light lay.

He twisted the blade and let the reflection of the ultrafocused moonbeam hit the werewolf properly.

There was time for one more unholy scream before it disintegrated into silvery webbing, which scattered just as quickly, leaving the twisted, almost mummified corpse of its host behind.

The 'corpse' glanced up for a moment, an odd sort of thanks in its worn gaze before it fell properly dead.

Victoria looked down at the withered thing, clutching the jet cross that she wore around her neck. "What a pitiable creature," she murmured.

"Are you alright, Your Majesty?" Sir Robert asked.

"Fine, fine," she said, tearing her eyes away from the sight. "I am uninjured."

Somehow, I doubted that was what he meant.

* * *

 

The next morning saw me kneeling before a Queen, a sword in one hand and a purse in her other. Beside me knelt a Time Lord and a blonde chav, and around us, the survivors of a nightmare. If any aspect of this scenario was uncommon, no-one present called it such.  
"By the power invested in me by the Church and the State, I dub thee Sir Doctor of TARDIS. By the power invested in me by the Church and the State, I dub thee Dame Rose Tyler of the Powell Estate. By the power invested in me by the Church and the State, I dub thee Sir Delaine Graham Neil of the West."

I wouldn't be the one to correct the nomenclature.

As the sword tip tapped my shoulders, first my right and then my left, I thought about the events of the night before.

There could have been more deaths. And there would be in the future, as the collaborators were located and put down for the attempt against the Queen.

Such was life and the price of treason, I supposed. Hopefully, Sir Robert would be granted leniency in the light of his services.

"You may stand."

We all rose together, the Doctor being the first to crack a grin.

"Many thanks, ma'am," he said.

"Nobody at home would believe me if I told them," Rose murmured.

Heh. My dad would have milked it for all it was worth and more besides. My _real_ family would have just ignored it, because no matter what titles I was given, I was still the same weirdo as I was the day before.

"Indeed," Victoria said as her eyes got steely. Uh oh. "Then you may think on this also. That I am not amused."

The Doctor blinked.

"Not _remotely_ amused," she continued, "And henceforth I banish you."

"I'm sorry?" we said together.

There had been almost zero tomfoolery. There had been a minimum of jackassery. Hell, there had been less blood spilled in general. What the hell was going on – oh, wait.

"I rewarded you, Sir Doctor, and now you are exiled from this empire, never to return. I don't know what you are, the two of you, or where you're from, but I know that you consort with stars and magic and think it fun. But your world is steeped in terror and blasphemy and death, and I will not allow it. You will leave this shores and you will reflect, I hope, on how you came to stray so far from all that is good, and how much longer you will survive this terrible life. Now leave my world, and never return."

Yeah, that was right. Conservatives. Fine for the era, but still a pain in my ass after all this time.

Why was I _not_ surprised?

* * *

 

We hopped off of the back of the hay cart, giving our thanks to the driver as we walked the rest of the way to the TARDIS.

"Well, that was fun," I said.

"Oh, werewolves, royalty, conspiracy…" the Doctor said with a shrug, "I'd say so. Doesn't hurt that we saved people, right?"

"True."

Rose spun around. "She banished us! For helping!"

I shrugged myself. "I got disowned for jumping when my dad told me to jump."

"What?"

" _Apparently_ , I was supposed to ask 'how high'."

"That's daft."

"Yep," I said, popping the 'P'. "And I've decided that I'm going to treat this banishment the same way I did that."

"And how's that?" the Doctor asked with a smile, apparently having a fair idea of where I was going.

"By not giving a flying fuck. I'm an American citizen. The Queen doesn't mean boo to me."

Besides, I'd like to see them _try_ to make me get off this rock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we resolve the plot of Tooth and Claw with a few less deaths, but no major alteration of history from canon.  
> Wah wah wah.  
> Anyway, as usual, comments, criticism and questions are welcome. Thank you for reading.


	6. Chapter 6

I never liked schools. Some schools managed to get past that initial wall of antipathy, but those were almost always colleges or magic-related. Most of the fondness rested on the architecture, really.

In a boring building of block shapes and shades of brown, beige, and grey, there was nothing to smooth over my distaste except the library.

The library was probably the best part of any given institution and I was an old hand at library work. Certainly, it wasn't the Unseen University, but the general absence of eldritch tomes attempting to eat my face was nice.

Kind of boring, on some level, but nice.

Maybe if I ever retired, I'd become a librarian. Maybe a teacher or a curator. Maybe something else. _If_ I ever retired, of course.

I shook my head with a smile as I finished putting away all the books on the cart.

The Doctor had gotten three of us in as members of the staff; Rose as a cafeteria worker, me as a librarian, and himself as a science teacher. Mickey got to hang out somewhere else with a computer and a cellphone.

Mickey was… reasonable. For all the writers, Rose, the Doctor, and life in general liked to shit on him, he was a normal person reacting to things in a normal way. It was just bad luck that the situation he was caught up in was way outside of the definition of normal.

I went back to the main desk and opened up the computer.

As far as the checkout history was concerned, this room was a desert. Nobody checked out books for pleasure, apparently, and even then, research projects were undertaken and completed as quickly as possible.

Somewhat typical, but considering that this school had rocketed to the tops of the scores… Suspicious, to say the least, and even more so when you tied in the reports of UFOs.

I grabbed the next cart. Ah, Titanic research. I remembered that project from my middle school days. Sixth or seventh grade. I'd gotten Anne Funk, second class. Oh that was sad.

Anyway, Titanic. MDS 910.9163.

These shelves were nearly bare, if only because the students had taken all the material to the available tables and then shoved them back into the circulation cart when they had gotten all the necessary tidbits and sources.

As I slid in the first few reference books, I didn't blink at the sight of two brown eyes staring back at me from the bookshelf.

"Anything interesting?" the Doctor asked.  
"Besides the free chips that are ever so slightly _off_ in flavor?" I asked, as I filled the hole in the shelf. "Well, if you want to know about something strange… for all the high ratings reported for this school, there isn't much going on in the way of _studying_."

The Doctor slid around the end of the row, leaning against the books casually. "Knowledge can be memorized, transferred or implanted; it doesn't arise from nothing."

"Never said it did, but wherever the kids are learning these things, it's not here," I said before shoving a book into his hands – 'The Demon Headmaster', one of the only pieces of fiction touched in the last week, appropriately enough – and flashing him a bright service industry beam. "Perhaps you could try one of the computer labs, sir. Might have a bit more luck there."

My vacuum-sealed smile turned into a proper smirk as I heard pages flipping behind me as a certain someone tried to figure out if I'd given him a cryptic hint or not.

It was fun playing games with people.

* * *

 

It was less fun looking at school food again. The chips were fine-ish and there was some sort of deep-fried meat-something alongside of it that seemed edible, but the rest was… well, it looked like a bit worse than 'pre-chewed'.

"Oh, this almost makes me nostalgic for the canned pudding," I muttered as I poked a splatter of vomit yellow… semi-liquid stuff with my fork. Was this supposed to be gravy?

"Regardless of what you mean by pudding, that sounds disgusting," the Doctor agreed, though he seemed to have less issue with what was on his plate. Spearing a chip on his fork, he took a bite and chewed thoughtfully before speaking again. "Like you said, flavor is a bit off."

"Might use a different oil," I said, taking a bite of my own. It was an odd sensation, the krillitane oil. It sort of 'greased' the gears of my mind, making everything flow quicker and opening up more space. Not quite as good as my 'true' mind, but still an incredible upkick from the standard human processing power. It did tend to fade a while after consumption, but I'd only been eating it for three days. A kid that had been regularly consuming it for a few months… now that would stick for a while and take a while longer to wash out of the system. Would likely be more effective as well, between neuroplasticity, body mass, and the average appetite of a pubescent human. "It's not peanut, too high a chance to set off allergies plus I'd know the taste. Canola or avocado, maybe. Bit sour if it is."

"Well, _I_ think they're gorgeous," Rose Tyler said, swiping one off of the Doctor's tray as she sat down at our table. She was dressed in formless cheap scrubs, an apron, and a hairnet, which all came together to make the sort of outfit that immediately brought to mind service industry drones of the most anonymous stripe. I fought down the urge to quote Mean Girls as she continued. "We've been here _three days_ and nothing. If I wanted to be bored in a dead-end job…"

"It was your boyfriend that put us onto it," the Doctor reminded her before leaning forward over his tray, "And he was right. Boy in class… rattled off information that he couldn't have had. Upper level stuff, I might have excused as him just being possessed of scientific interest, but he knew how to pull off FTL travel, which you lot won't be discovering for another few centuries."

"So, someone's been feeding him and the others those sorts of numbers. To what end?"

"Oh, that was directed at me?" he asked before shrugging. "Well, could be anything. Wetware calculation machines – seen it done before –, brainwashing to get an 'in' into the next generation of science, might just be using them to pick intergalactic lottery numbers. Can't really get a pin down without more information. Can't make bricks without clay. One thing I can tell you; this place is really well behaved for a building full of children."

"What were you expecting? Hoodies? Ringtones?" I said, "Sorry, it's all uniform and no phones here. Strict pol-lice-ee."

"You'd think there'd be at least _one_ example of anti-social behavior…" he half-whined.

"Point thirty-six for the brainwashing column."

The conversation petered out as another lunch lady came over. This one looked like anything resembling 'kindness' had been surgically removed decades ago and replaced by lemon juice. "You are not permitted to leave your station during a sitting," she hissed at Rose.

"Was just talking to these two," Rose mumbled.

The Doctor waved.

"He doesn't like the _chips_ ," she said, as if this was some sad secret.

"The _menu_ has been specifically designed by the headmaster to improve concentration and performance," the woman snarled before turning her hateful gaze back to Rose. "Now, get back to work."

With that and one final glare, the woman who I was sorely tempted to call 'Ms. Bitters' vanished back into the depths of the cantina.

Rose rolled her eyes, doing a final turn to face us. "This is me; dinner lady."

"I'll have the crumble," the Doctor said.

"I'm so going to kill you."

I raised an eyebrow.

Finally looking away from Rose Tyler's retreating back, the Doctor caught my incredulous look. "What?"

"Trying to figure out the dynamics here," I replied.

"I like her. She likes me. It won't last, but really, what does? What's there to figure out beyond that?" he said, surprisingly blasé with his answer.

To be fair, that was pretty much it at this point. Not much evidence to say otherwise – oh, except the entire Bad Wolf thing and constantly ditching her alleged 'boyfriend' to hang out with you, forget her hackles going up every time you even _breathed_ in another woman's direction…

Listen, boy-o, if a woman is willing to set two universes on fire – not just fire, but 'apocalypse in three-point-five seconds if ignited' wild _hellfire_ – to get back to you, there has to be something more than 'like' going on, because that is some nigh godlike yandere action of which I have only seen maybe two or three cases like in all my universe-hopping existence.

"Eh, probably not much," I said as casually as possible for someone who was screaming 'what the hell' at various volumes. Hopefully my disapproving/disbelieving stare hadn't been held for too long.

I looked around the room. Little noise, beyond muffled small talk and the sound of cutlery clashing on plastics. Not much in the way of movement either, save for the odd teacher making their rounds. And above it all, loomed the Headmaster.

I would not compare him to Giles, even if he did look exactly like Anthony Head, nor would I make any Shrieky Bat People jokes. I made no promises about stabbings.

The Doctor was looking at him too, though we both glanced down as his eyes turned towards us.

"Definitely something about the chips," I said.

The Doctor nodded. "Oh, definitely."

* * *

 

When Sarah Jane walked into the library, I could not contain my squee. It didn't matter that the obviously evil Headmaster Finch was at her side or that it was very clearly just part of the tour, the noise just kind of… slipped out.

Wait. I take it back. 'Slipped out' implied quiet. This was the squeal of an oil slicked pig let loose in a nunnery, minus the choir of shocked nuns surrounding it.

"You must be familiar with Miss Smith's work," the headmaster said, his hand reflexively going to his ear. "She's writing a profile about me for the Sunday Times. Do try to render her as much assistance as you are… capable."

"Yes!" Oh god, that was high pitched. I probably sounded like a Furby on cocaine. I slapped my hands over my mouth, pinching the traitorous pit shut with my fingers until I was sure that the next noise coming out wasn't going to crack glass. "Ah… can I help you with something?"

Sarah Jane tilted her head at me, the look in her eyes both analyzing and amused. "Oh, I was simply wondering if I could borrow some of the space so I could conduct a few interviews. If that's not an inconvenience of course…"

"Oh! Of course not! It's no trouble at all, Miss Smith!" I pointed at a table slightly off to the side, near a window, and tried to ignore the papers I'd just sent flying everywhere with the speed of the action. "Nobody really sits over there! Great cellphone signal, too!"

She gave me one last bemused look as she went over to the area I indicated, Headmaster Finch following her. As soon as I was sure she couldn't see me, I started kicking myself. Damn my inner fan child.

I hoped this moment didn't get back to the companions at 'home'. Who was I kidding? It would.

"Who else can get that sort of noise out of you? Thought I knew some screamers…" the Doctor whispered from just behind me.

Not even _that_ horrible comment could kill my grin, even if part of me demanded I introduce his side to my elbow for the remark. Ten might have possessed a tendency to say exactly the wrong thing, but that particular combination of words was a bit much to call an accident.

"There's probably a list, but Tom Baker walking through the door right now might get me to shatter glass," I said.

"Who on Earth is Tom Baker?" he asked before shaking his head. "Anyway, Sarah Jane's an old companion."

"I figured," I said, finally losing the octave jump my voice had involuntarily picked up, "There's no reason to be writing a profile on this guy. School might be turning out the scores, but that would justify an article about the school with _maybe_ an interview with the headmaster attached, not a proper profile. She's probably just appealing to his ego to get into the building. Easy play, works well."

"Mmm. Figured out the _dynamics_ , have you?" the Doctor said, leaning back to lean against a shelf.

"A few, and since she's a former associate of yours, that solidifies my theory that she's here for the same reasons as us. Checking out the UFO sightings and the suspicious activity," I replied, going around the desk to pick up the mess I made. "Interview eyewitnesses, survey the territory, see if the suspicious-as-fuck man in charge of it all is as evil as he looks…"

"He doesn't _look_ that evil."

"He stands on a balcony to loom over everyone at lunchtime, watching as all within his domain eat his strange, possibly spiked with something awful chips," I replied. "All he needs is a Nehru jacket, gloves, and a goatee and he's a ready-made Bond villain."

The Doctor lifted up a finger as if to argue the point and then lowered it again. "Okay, point; it's a little ominous. But I don't believe in 'evil at first sight'."

Fair enough.

The final bell of the day rang and there was the distant rumble of a couple hundred school children making for the doors. Brainwashing or not, that instinct to get the hell out of Educational Dodge was immutable.

"So, are we on for tonight?" I asked.  
"Hm? Oh. Oh! Yes, absolutely. If you don't mind Rose and Mickey tagging along."

"Wouldn't have it any other way," I said as I straightened the last of the papers. "Four hours?"

"Five works better," the Doctor replied.

"Then it's a date."

* * *

 

Though I hadn't used 'date' in the romantic sense, breaking into a school at night to find evidence of illicit alien deeds was probably better than some of the actual dates I'd been on. To be fair, I wasn't much for romance in the first place.

The school, despite being very much the same building we'd been working in for the last three days, was completely different at night. What the sun painted in shades of grey and brown sank into black and moonlight blue.

"It's weird, seeing school at night. It's just wrong," Rose said around a wide grin. "When I was young, I used to think all the teachers slept in the school."

Well, if anyone was asleep, any noise we could make would certainly wake them up.

"Alright, team." the Doctor said before frowning. "Team… don't quite like the sound of that. Gang? Comrades?"  
"Fellowship of reckless idiots?" I suggested.

"Anyway," he continued, "Rose? You go to the kitchens, get a sample of that oil. Mickey, all the new staff are Maths teachers, so go and check out the Maths department. I'll be checking in on the headmaster's office. Delaine…"

"I'll go with Mickey. He doesn't really know the layout." Didn't really feel like Rose and definitely didn't want to play third wheel during the Doctor's reunion with Sarah Jane.

"…right. Be back here in ten minutes," the Doctor said before running up the stairs and into the dark.

Rose broke off towards the kitchens and I gestured for Mickey to follow me.

"Uh, so we haven't been properly introduced, I'm Mickey," he said after the second corridor.

"Delaine," I replied, checking a hallway. Empty, like I suspected, but it never hurt to check.

"How'd you end up with the Doctor anyway?"

"Naked mole rat from space was kidnapping people at Christmas," I said, "Rose was at an ABBA concert."

Math department was this wing, yes, though there was a handful of misplaced science labs mixed in. I wasn't entirely certain which doors lead to those.

"…okay," Mickey said, pushing a door open for want of a better response. "Let's take a look in here."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that from the lack of computers, this was probably one of those misplaced science labs.

I pawed through the desks anyway. Typical chemistry, typical dissection tools, typical, typical, typi–

A door creaked open and Mickey screamed. If stealth was important – and it likely was –, the mission was void.

Typical.

Credit to the sort of people the Doctor attracted, it barely took them half a minute to get here.

"Oh, god. Rats! Vacuum packed rats!" Rose said.

"Screaming like a little girl over a few dozen dead rats?" the Doctor said, kicking at the pile of dead animals. "I've seen bigger. Big enough to gnaw a man's leg off."

"Yes, yes, so big you had to take an elephant gun after them," Mickey spat, "They took me by surprise!"

"And your response was to scream like a little girl."

"It was dark and I was covered with rats!"

"I'm thinking nine, maybe ten years old. I'm seeing pig tails, a frilly skirt…"

"Focus!" Rose and I snapped at the same time.

"Anything strange about this?" Rose continued after giving me a hard stare. "Rats in a school?"

"Clearly, they're for dissection in Biology lessons," Sarah Jane sniffed, "Or maybe you haven't reached that bit yet. How old are you?"

"Excuse me, they don't dissect rats in school anymore," Rose countered, "They haven't done that in years. Where are you from, the Dark Ages?"

"Oh really?" Sarah Jane said.

"You think this is bad, my school dissected cow's eyes, pig's lungs, and cats," I said casually as I toed a piebald rat.

That derailed the catfight instantly. "What?"

"Well, the cow's eyes and pig's lungs was elementary… primary school. Found a bit of food in the pig's esophagus, that was nasty. A few schools did other stuff that I heard about later. Earthworms, chicken legs, frogs. Cats were high school. I skipped that class. I heard someone found kittens."

Mickey looked ready to have kittens himself. Everyone else settled for looked vaguely disturbed.

"What kind of school did you go to?" Sarah Jane asked.  
"Rural America, where all the money goes into maths and athletics and everyone else gets shafted," I said with a shrug. "Anyway, in the event that Mickey's catlike tread has brought the wrong sort of attention to us, should we continue or retreat?"

"Was going to rerail the conversation, but yes! Retreat, after checking out the headmaster's office. Everything started when he arrived, might as well go to the source."

The Doctor and the cat fight of the day stepped out into the hallway and I elbowed Mickey.

"Ten quid says it's full of sleeping nasties," I whispered.

"No bet," he replied before casting a glance at the rest of the group. "Ten quid Rose tries to kill this bird before we leave?"

"No bet," I said as the cat fight recommenced. Was it wrong that I was wholly on Sarah Jane's side? Ah, of course not.

"I don't mean to be rude or anything, but who exactly are you?" Rose asked.  
Sarah Jane didn't even blink. "Sarah Jane Smith. I used to travel with the Doctor."

"Oh. Well, he's never mentioned you."

"Oh, I must've done. Sarah Jane. Mention her all the time," the Doctor said weakly.  
Rose bared her teeth. "Hold on. Sorry. Never."  
"What, not even once? He didn't mention me even once?" Sarah Jane asked as her eyes darted to the Doctor, hurt obvious on her face.

The Doctor looked like a man caught two equally dangerous predatory cats. Mickey, on the other hand, looked like the world had just given him an extra special chocolate cake, complete with buttercream frosting and the little edible ball bearings.

"Ho, ho, mate. The missus and the ex. Welcome to every man's worst nightmare," he said as he clapped the Doctor on the shoulder.

"Heeheehoho, you apes are all so funny," the Doctor grumbled quietly.

I flashed him a grin as I passed him. "Yes, we are."

* * *

 

Upon locating the resident colony of the Shrieky Bat People – thirteen exactly, a good number for us to deal with –, we retreated to the parking lot, where Sarah Jane's car and K-9 awaited.

"K-9!" the Doctor crowed as Sarah Jane unveiled the legendary tin dog. The robot was in bad condition, half of his shell gone while the rest was horribly dented and rusted. Cords and wires spilled out of his exposed innards and the sad slump of K-9's head seemed rather permanent. "Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler, allow me to introduce K-9… well, K-9 Mrk III, to be precise."

Mickey looked like he would have rather been back looking at the alien bat people again.

"It's so…" Rose seemed to be searching for the appropriate word, "Disco."

"Oi, this was cutting edge in the year 5000," the Doctor scolded.

"I love it," I breathed.

"You don't even know what it is!" Mickey said.

"It's a dog-box on wheels and he's got a cute collar!" What more could anyone want? Besides functionality.

"He has a laser nose too," the Doctor said.

Correction; anyone could want that. "That only means I love him more."

The Doctor grinned though that fell away as he studied the damage more. "Oh, what happened to you? Couldn't you get him repaired?" he asked Sarah Jane.

"There's a shop for little tin dogs? It's not like getting parts for a Mini Metro. He just kind of… gave out one day," Sarah Jane said, "Beside the point, the technology inside him could rewrite human science. I couldn't show him to just anyone."

It was a fair point, though the Doctor shrugged a little at that detail as he continued scratching behind K-9's 'ears'. "What's the mean lady done to you?" he cooed.

Sarah Jane just rolled her eyes with a smile as she gestured for everyone to pile into her car. Rose did without any voiced complaint, and while me and Mickey piled into the back, the Doctor just opted to hop in the 'trunk' with K-9.

I stole a glance at the moon as we made our way to a late night diner and made a note of the swooping bat-like creatures that occasionally crossed it. Yes, our little incursion hadn't gone unnoticed.

I continued to watch the sky as the rest of the gang wrestled K-9 into the coffee shop and then took a seat near the front window. Watching, though I had a feeling that 'watching' was all the Krillitanes were up to as well.

The clink of cups on saucers, the dull buzz of conversation, and the whine of the sonic screwdriver only played on my nerves because I knew something could happen. Something bad could blindside me if I wasn't paying attention and, even if I didn't like some of the people I was intent on protecting, I'd do it never the less.

"Where you dropped me off… It wasn't Croydon," Sarah Jane said, bringing my attention back to inside the coffee shop.

"Hm? Where was it?" the Doctor asked, his attention clearly elsewhere.

"Aberdeen."

Nice.

"Right. That's close to Croydon, yes?"

"Depending on the Aberdeen, your answers are 'no' and 'wrrrong continent'," I said, throwing in my first words since we'd arrived.

K-9 whirred back to life, interrupting any other conversation as his red optic flickering to life as he stuttering through a greeting. "M-Massss—ter."

The Doctor jumped up. "He recognized me!" he cooed.  
"Aff-firmative," K-9 replied.

"The oil, Rose!" the Doctor asked and, as soon as the sample was in his hands, he unscrewed it, reaching down to dip his finger into it.

"Uh, I wouldn't touch it. One of the dinner lady's got all scorched," she said.

"Rose, I'm not a dinner lady, I'm a Time Lord. And don't assume that's a common sentence for me," he said, dipping his thumb onto the yellow oil and swiping it across K-9's suction cup probe. "Here we go. K-9, what is our mystery substance?"

"Oi-oil. Ex-ex-ex-extract. Ana-ana-analy-ziiiiiing!"

"Oh man, now _that's_ a voice," Mickey said around a giggle.

"Careful. That's my dog," Sarah Jane warned as the Doctor pinned him with a glare.

"Confirmation of anaaaalysis com-complete," K-9 chirped, "Substance is Krrrillitane Oil."

The Doctor stared before dragging a hand down his face. "They're Krillitanes. Great."

"What's a Krillitane?" Rose asked. "Is that bad?"

"It's certainly not good. No, really it's very bad. Ultra bad. A suitcase full of unadulterated badness waiting to explode and render the city uninhabitable. They're a composite race, kind of like humans and culture, except that the Krillitanes aren't much of a melting pot so much as cherry picking the 'best' traits of whoever they conquer, physical and cultural. Then, as soon as they've got all that they want, they destroy what's left. Genetic and social restructuring on a species wide basis," he said, running a hand through his hair. "Didn't recognize them because they must have made a lot more conquests since our last run in. Last set just looked like long necked humans, but now… they had some work done."

"What are they doing here?" Mickey asked.  
I grimaced. "Isn't it obvious? They want something. And they're using the children to get it."

* * *

 

"What do you think his end game is?" the Doctor asked.

We'd all split up. Rose and Sarah Jane were going to gut one of the computer labs while Mickey was left with K-9 in the car and I was right behind the Doctor. If that was because he thought my opinion was worth something or he simply thought that I'd make a good patsy to play off of, I didn't know. Ten was an idiot.

"Well, with the data we have… despite their adaptability, the Krillitane have need of the children. The children spend most of their time in school on computers and have knowledge that shouldn't be possible on Earth in this era," I said watching the children rush pass us like waters around rocks. "So they need an answer to a problem. They're trying to pin down 42, so to speak, not just because it represents something, but because it gives them power of some description. You're the brilliant Time Lord; what sort of question needs this sort of set-up and brainpower to answer?"

He looked away. "Oh, there's a short list."

"Whatever Finch's goal is, he need intelligence to gain it. And you've made no secret about yours. Don't let him play you," I warned him.  
"Yes. I'm only nine hundred years older than you; I've heard it all."

But it only takes one yes, I wanted to say.

We stepped into the pool room, the Doctor going on ahead while I waited by the door. There was nothing extraordinary about it, apart from the fact that it was completely empty save for 'Headmaster Finch' standing in the corner like a lurking specter, his black suit failing to blend in with the peeling blue paint all around him.

"So who are you?" the Doctor asked, any affability melting away into cold ice. Yes, this was what they called the Storm. It could protect you, punish you, or pass you by, but there was no way to ignore it.

"My name is Brother Lassa," Finch said before he tilted his head to the side, studying the Doctor. The human at his heel was of little consequence, apparently. "And you?"  
"The Doctor. Since when did Krillitanes have wings?"  
The alien smiled as he walked along the side of the pool. "It's been our form for nearly ten generations now. Our ancestors invaded Bessan. The people there had some rather lovely wings. They made a million widows in one day. Just imagine."  
The Doctor wasn't even slightly amused by the anecdote. "And now you're shaped human," he said.  
"A personal favourite, that's all," Finch said, his entire posture humble and ever so slightly contrite. A conscious shift, because every other time I'd seen the man, the façade of human body language would slip way to something distinctly… not. He was an alien after all. Human body language would be learned, not ingrained.  
"And the others?"  
"My brothers remain bat form. What you see is a simple morphic illusion. Scratch the surface and the true Krillitane lies beneath," the alien said before turning the conversation around, "And what of the Time Lords? I always thought of you as such a pompous race. Ancient, dusty senators, so frightened of change and chaos. And of course, they're all but extinct. Only you. The last."  
The Doctor barely flinched, the words skating by him smoothly. "This plan of yours. What is it?"  
The Krillitane seemed surprised by this. "You don't know."  
"That's why I'm asking."  
"Well, show me how clever you are," Finch purred as he stepped closer to the Doctor, "Work it out."

The Doctor stared down his nose at the alien. "If I don't like it, then it will stop."  
"Fascinating," Finch said, tilting his head from side to side as he stared deep into the Doctor's eyes. "Your people were peaceful to the point of indolence. You seem to be something new. Would you declare war on us, Doctor?"  
"I'm so old now. I used to have so much mercy. You get one warning. That was it."

With that, the Doctor turned on his heel, walking back towards the door where I stood.  
"But we're not even enemies. Soon you will embrace us."

The Doctor turned to give Finch a look, but the alien continued on regardless.

"The next time we meet," he said, "you will join with me. I promise you."

With that, the headmaster walked past me and out the door.

* * *

 

"He's trying to play you," Delaine said as soon as Lassa was gone.

"Eh?"

"Show me how clever you are," she said, imitating the Krillitane's voice and measure, "Fascinating. You seem to be something _new_. The implication that you are superior to the other members of your race."

"Who's to say I'm not?" the Doctor said. The Time Lords were corrupt and, indeed, 'indolent'. How many times had they called upon him to do their dirty work, only to throw him under the bus as soon as the deed was done?

Her gaze turned hard and pointed at that, the sort that he'd seen on his own face at odd intervals. Oh, so something about that line was familiar. Too close to home, wherever that was.

"Not. The. Point," she growled, "He knows you're angled to stop him, but you don't know enough to have any concrete sentiment about it. Not until you know what his own angle is. If he can feel you out, dangle the right bait in front of you, he can get you to do what he wants… or to let your guard down enough to make it so it doesn't even matter."

"You are a suspicious one," the Doctor said as they walked down the hall towards where Sarah Jane and Rose were supposed to be. Hopefully, they'd found something he could work with, just to round down the number of possibilities.  
"I'm not _suspicious_ , I'm just accustomed to manipulators. This 'Lassa' is just another in a long line. He's appealing to your ego and I'm not entirely convinced that you didn't swallow the bait whole."

Wasn't that what Delaine said Sarah Jane was doing yesterday?

Appeal to ego. Easy play, works well.

"So what do you suggest I do about it?" he asked.

Delaine looked surprised that he'd actually asked her for her opinion. "Act like you took the bait," she said, schooling her face back into what he suspected as a normal frown, "Be aware that his compliments are just there for the sake of turning your cause into his, and try to figure out his angle in getting your assistance. He wants your mind. We just have to figure out _why_."

The Doctor considered the question. "They're an adaptable species, but they're not here for conquest. Really, there's not much they could get out of your species in the first place. They already discarded that model. But you said something about calculation. 42. The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything."

"But they don't seem like the kind that just want an answer," she shot back, "Less 42, more Anti-Life Equation."

The Doctor grinned. Ah, this one had been a good pick. "Little less comic book, a little more reality, Delaine," he said as he pushed open the doors to the computer lab, "Rose, Sarah Jane –"

The two fell over laughing at the sight of him.

Oh for the days when companions had respect...

A klaxon rang out as a voice came on over the speakers. "All pupils to class immediately. And would all staff congregate to the class room."

"And now's the part where people start dying," Delaine hissed.

The Doctor didn't quite have the heart to disagree, instead focusing on opening one of the computer casings. No luck.

"I thought the sonic screwdriver could open anything," Sarah Jane said.

He held up the sonic screwdiver and grimaced. "Anything except a deadlock seal. Just what I didn't need. What are they teaching those kids?"

"No, no, no. This rooms closed. Go to the South Hall," Rose murmured from the door. Students.

Were all the staff dead yet? It was a pity. The Doctor hadn't even mildly disliked Parsons. A lingering soft spot for history teachers, he supposed.

The sound of every escape in the building slamming shut cut off that train of thought, and then the screen of every computer in the room lit up green, alien symbols meshing with human code in a flurry of activity, almost too fast for the human eye to follow.

The Doctor wasn't human, however, and it only took a moment to realize that the program was.

"No… it can't be."

"What is it?" Rose asked.

"Skasis Paradigm," he murmured.  
"That doesn't sound good," Sarah Jane said.

"It's a reality breaker. Universal Theory. Forbidden in forty-seven systems. Not that it stops people from trying, because if you crack it, it has the potential to rewrite reality. You control it, you have control over the building blocks of the universe," the Doctor said, "That's why the Krillitane came here. They didn't have access to a great enough unconsciousness to serve as the activator, but humans… particularly human children, do. Combine that with the necessary intelligence and creativity... accelerated by the oil, well, they have themselves a chain of human computers ready to give them –"

"42," Delaine said.

"Yep. Computed through body, mind, and soul."

"So you've solved the riddle," Finch said as he stepped into the room. "Now let the real lesson begin." Everyone stepped back, but the alien continued speaking, dauntless of the reaction he was getting. "Think of it, Doctor. With the Paradigm solved, reality becomes clay in our hands. We can shape the universe and improve it."  
"Oh yeah? The whole of creation with the face of Mister Finch?" the Doctor asked, "Call me old fashioned, but I like things as they are."  
The alien twisted his head, studying him again. Looking for a reaction. "You act like such a radical, and yet all you want to do is preserve the old order? Think of the changes that could be made if this power was used for good."

Manipulation, rather barefaced if the Doctor was looking for it. Use this power for 'good', never mind that the Krillitane had gotten this far through murder and manipulation.

"What, by someone like you?" he asked.  
"No, someone like you," Finch purred, "The Paradigm gives us power, but you… _you_ could give us wisdom."

Appeal to ego. Easy play. Works well.

"Become a God at my side. Imagine what you could do. Think of the civilizations you could save. Perganon, Assinta. Your own people, Doctor, standing tall. The Time Lords reborn."

Appeal to grief, appeal to power, appeal to nostalgia.

The Doctor was still tempted. The scars were still fresh, for all they felt old sometimes.

"Doctor, don't listen to him," Sarah Jane said. Pleading.  
Finch turned to her. "And you could be with him throughout eternity. Young, fresh, never wither, never age, never die."

The Doctor flinched and Finch turned his attention back to him. "Their lives are so fleeting. So many goodbyes. How lonely you must be, Doctor. Join us."

"I could save everyone."

It was barely a murmur.  
"Yes," Finch said.  
"I could stop the war," he said, this time louder.

"In the name of peace and sanity."

The Doctor froze.

The words were and were not his. Ancient, buried.

Resurrected.

"Imagine a world without death. Not a universe, that's a little too _big_ for this hypothetical. Imagine, Doctor," Delaine continued, as cold and as serious as the promise of a hurricane. Cold enough to shatter whatever spell Finch had cast with his honeyed words and as irresistible as the storm's edge, "Imagine a world where nobody could die. Nobody could age. It might as well not be touched by time at all. The world turns, Doctor, as it is meant to. That is its design. Pain and loss have their place and all things have their time. Planets come and go. Stars fade. And everything ends. Nothing can be eternal."

There would be a question later. Several, actually. But for now…

The Doctor grabbed a chair and threw it at the screen on the wall, sending all the lights pulsing between darkness and blinding white.

"Everybody out!"

* * *

 

There was an awful lot of running in this lifestyle. Right now the running was down the stairs, jumping down as many steps as you could without falling. The sound of inhuman, presumably Krillitane shrieking filled the halls like the fire alarm from hell.

I twisted around Mickey, who had driven Sarah Jane's car through the front doors to their mutual destruction. A kid was following just behind, bespectacled, chubby, and with the sort of spiky hair that didn't accompany popularity.

"What's going on?" Mickey asked.

"Bats. Big nasty bats," Rose got out between gasps.

As if on cue, the Krillitane came leaping out of one of the hallways, thankfully unable to get their wings fully open in the enclosed space. Everyone ran in the opposite direction, towards the physics wing.

As soon as we were inside the classroom, the Doctor locked the door behind us. "That's not going to hold them for long," he said, "but I… the oil. Rose, you said that the oil burned one of them up?"

"Yeah, one of the Krillitane's pretending to be a dinner lady. Smoke and everything."

"They've modified themselves so much that they're allergic to their own oil. We can use that," the Doctor said as he spun around. "How much was in the kitchen?" he asked.

"Barrels of it," Rose said.

"Oh, I've got a plan, then," the Doctor said. He flinched away from the door as long claws gouged chunks out. "Okay, 78.5 percent of a plan. Mickey, I need you to get all the kids unplugged. But how to distract the bats…"

The kid punched the fire alarm and the sound of high pitched ringing filled the school.

"…that works," the Doctor said, "NOW RUN!"

The cantina wasn't so far, but it seemed all the farther away when the fire alarm abruptly cut out. Still we made it, gathering the barrels together in the middle of the room.

The Doctor hissed and slapped at the sonic screwdriver. "Deadbolt seals again. I'm starting to really dislike this Finch. Can't get them open…"

"The vats would not withstand a direct hit from my laser," K-9 chirped as he squeaked into the room, "but my batteries are failing."

"Right," the Doctor said, "Everyone out the back door. K9, stay with me. And you."

I stopped, halfway out the door, and looked at the Doctor.

"We're having a conversation later," the Doctor said.

Fair enough.

I ran out of the door and it wasn't long before the Doctor followed, locking the door behind him.

"Where's K-9?" Sarah asked.

"We need to run," the Doctor said, pulling her along as we all ran. Soon, we were surrounded by children, all screaming as they ran out of the building.  
"What have you done?" she yelled right as the school exploded.

The screaming abruptly turned into cheers as the children realized that school was out in a most permanent fashion. Forget that their teachers were dead. Forget that some of their classmates had been eaten. Kenny – I could only assume that was the kid who'd been running with us away from the Krillitane – was their new king.

"Destroyed a school. There's one mark off my bucket list," I said.

Mickey and Rose seemed to agree with this as they celebrated with the children. Just to the side, the Doctor and Sarah Jane stood, staring at the smoking ruin.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor said, wrapping his arm around Sarah Jane's shoulder.

"It's all right. He was… he was just a daft metal dog," she said through tears, "It's fine, really."

I swallowed. I knew the Doctor would give her a… an upgraded K-9, but as someone who worked with robots and A.I., a new chassis didn't always mean that the old friend was back again. No, that all relied on the programming… the soul.

And as far as Sarah Jane was concerned, the 'daft metal dog' was gone for good.

The Doctor pulled away after a while, gesturing for Rose, Mickey, and me to follow him back to the TARDIS. We had some work to do.

* * *

 

Where the TARDIS was concerned, three hours could be a week and a day could be five minutes. For Sarah Jane, the TARDIS was gone only a day and a city away. This time properly in a London park relatively shielded from the public eye.

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS as she approached, smiling as he saw her.

"Cup of tea?" he asked before stepping back to let her inside.

The TARDIS, for all she was so much the same on the outside, was completely different on the inside. Instead of the soft whites and greys that her Doctor had been surrounded by, this one was orange and blue. Taller too, with great coral struts that supported the ceiling and a time rotor that stretched up almost as high. It was like stepping into an alien world again.

"You've redecorated," Sarah Jane said.

"Do you like it?" the Doctor asked.

"Oh, yes, I do," she said, eyes tracing the half-familiar patterns of the roundels, "I think I preferred it as it was, but it'll do."

"Really? I _love_ it." Rose Tyler chirped in. Mickey stood behind her though Delaine seemed invisibly separated from the group, standing on the far side of the console from everyone else.

"Is everything alright?" Sarah Jane asked.

"Course, why wouldn't it be?" Rose asked, "Evil plot defeated, reality preserved, metal dog –" she cut off. "Yeah, everything's fine. Uh, Doctor?"

The Doctor looked up from the console, a grin spreading on his face. "Right, we're about to head off, but… you could come with us?" he asked, almost hopefully.

Sarah Jane was tempted. Sorely so, almost to the point where her 'no' was barely more than a sigh. "I can't do this anymore. Besides, I've got a much bigger adventure ahead. Time I stopped waiting for you and found a life of my own."

The Doctor smiled, as if that was the answer he was half-expecting.

"Can I come?" Mickey asked before holding up his hands, "No, not with you, I mean with you. Because I'm _not_ the tin dog, and I want to see what's out there."

The smile had crumbled into a faint sneer of disgust.

"Oh, go on, Doctor," she said, "Sarah Jane Smith, a Mickey Smith. You need a Smith on board."

Rose mouthed 'no' at the Doctor, though the gesture seemed to be largely ignored, as the Doctor seemed to wrestle with the idea before relenting. "Okay then, I could do with a laugh."

Mickey turned to Rose. "Rose, is that okay?"

It was clear to see that it was patently not. "No, great. Why not?" Rose bit out.

Sarah Jane shook her head. Young people… god, she'd been one of them once. "Well, I'd better go."

Delaine finally seemed to rouse from her brooding at that. "Wait, wait," she said, fishing for something in her pocket. She finally produced a card and held it out. "Standing invitation to the House of Mysteries. My treat."

Sarah Jane took the card, noting that for all it seemed relatively plain – nothing more than the name and an address on yellowed white cardstock – it seemed to have that odd magic that the TARDIS did from the outside. "I'll keep that in mind. Thank you."

The girl smiled – the most life Sarah Jane had seen on that face today – but didn't say anything else as the invisible divide in the TARDIS returned.

"Well, I should be off," she said pushing open the doors. The Doctor followed her.

"It's daft, but I haven't ever thanked you for that time," Sarah Jane said as she stepped back out into the real world and looked up into the blue sky, "And like I said, I wouldn't have missed it for the world."  
"Something to tell the grandkids," the Doctor said.

She smiled sadly. "Oh, I think it'll be someone else's grandkids now."  
He winced. "Right. Yes, sorry. I didn't get a chance to ask. You haven't? There hasn't been anyone? You know."  
Sarah Jane felt her smile take a more playful twist. "Well… there was this one guy. I travelled with him for a while, but he was a tough act to follow. Goodbye, Doctor."  
"Oh, it's not goodbye."  
"Do say it. Please. This time. Say it."  
"Goodbye," the Doctor said softly right before he hugged her, lifting her off her feet as he turned around, his coat flaring out behind him, "my Sarah Jane!"  
He set her down gently, returning to the TARDIS and giving her one last look before he shut the door.

She turned away, not quite willing to see the TARDIS disappear for what would probably be the last time. The familiar wheeze of dematerialization filled the park and she turned on impulse, catching sight of the last bit of blue fading away…

And something silver that had been hiding behind the TARDIS all the while.

"K9!"  
"Mistress," the metal dog replied curtly.  
"But you were blown up," Sarah Jane said, running her hands over the new, smooth chassis. Not a trace of rust or dent was obvious, for all K-9 otherwise looked exactly the same.  
"Master rebuilt me," the robot explained, "My systems are much improved with new undetectable hyperlink facilities."

Sarah Jane couldn't hold back her laughter. "Oh, he so replaced you with a brand new model."  
"Affirmative," K-9 said, wagging his tail.  
"Yeah, he does that," she said as she stood up and started walking down the path. "Come on, you. Home. We've got work to do."  
"Affirmative."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yee, long chapter. Finally done though.
> 
> Things are happening, Christmas is nigh, everything outside my window has turned to Hoth...
> 
> But a nearly 8,000 word chapter isn't anything to sneeze at either.
> 
> So, as always, comments and criticism are welcome. Have a pleasant frozen hell month.


	7. Chapter 7

Somehow, I wasn't surprised that the Doctor had handcuffs somewhere on the TARDIS. He got in enough trouble and ran away from enough figures of authority, it would be more surprising if he hadn't snagged some sort of souvenir along the way.

A pair of Hiatt speedcuffs were a hardly surprising choice, given his usual area of operations on Earth, though the Doctor's choice to leave my arms in front of me was… questionable. Well, he wasn't a trained cop, so I suppose I couldn't fault him on that.

I shook my head, settling into a neutral headspace. No questions, no answers, no tangents. Just nothing but absolute calm. And maybe some annoyance.

Yes, annoyance was allowed. 'Conversation' didn't translate to imprisonment in any language I knew of, but here I was; handcuffed and locked in a room, occasionally having questions thrown at me.

Who are you? Who sent you?

What do you know about the Time War?

The room was… well, it might have been a double of the Zero Room, if not for the fact it felt claustrophobic by design. There wasn't much to speak of otherwise; it was pinkish-grey, oddly designed, and empty save for me, sitting on the floor, my hands locked in front of me.

It was a little cold in here, but that might have just been me. I didn't feel right without a coat or a jacket, but _apparently_ I'd lost outerwear privileges.

Why he'd even waited to throw me in here until we'd finished putting K-9 together for Sarah Jane… well, maybe it was one of those character litmus tests. Maybe he just thought I'd be less useless than Rose or Mickey.

Maybe he hadn't found the handcuffs until later.

I stilled as the Doctor entered the room, my entire demeanor chilling by about forty degrees. This was the third or fourth time today – actually, the fourth time in sixteen hours, my mental clock reminded me –, though this time he wasn't carrying any sort of equipment with him. I hadn't seen Rose or Mickey once.

Did they even know?

"Tell me, how long have you been a Time Agent?" the Doctor asked.

I didn't answer. He didn't even get the benefit of a blink.

Rose probably knew all about this. Morality was flexible between the two, even more so when it came to a possible rival. Mickey wasn't part of the 'clique', so what he thought was irrelevant.

"There wasn't much of an artron trace on you, but it's there. Could just be from the TARDIS, but it's a bit heavy for how much time you've spent here and, besides that point, you know too much," the Doctor continued, as if somehow throwing the information at me would suddenly make me crack. "You are human, so that rules out a number of options for your origin, but you are above what is typical for the twenty-first century. Whoever sent you should have known that."

Channeling your Seven, aren't you, Doctor. Looking for designs and plots that aren't there.

All because of six little words.

The irony wasn't lost on me.

"It might be that you're simply time sensitive and athletic on top of those lovely brains of yours, but I don't put a lot of stock in coincidences. Showing up on Christmas after a massive alien invasion that I dealt with single handedly? Not the smartest strategic move."

He looked down at me again, searching for some kind of reaction.

Unfortunately for him, my face was stone.

You don't scare me. I've put down bigger and badder with infinitely less than I have now.

The Doctor looked away, working his jaw a little as he turned something over in his mind. Obviously, it wasn't something he thought about for long, because it wasn't more than a minute before he stretched out his hands to touch my temples.

As soon as I felt the pressure of psychic contact, I pushed him out.

He tried again, harder.

This time, the push was a shove. This is _my_ place, I impressed on the intrusive presence. You're not welcome here.

The Doctor rocked back on his heels, a frown on his face as he studied me again, annoyance and no small bit of confusion written all over his face.

"What are you?" he asked.

I didn't answer.

* * *

Rose sat in the console room of the TARDIS, legs crossed and thumbs twiddling as she ignored Mickey's attempts to draw her into conversation. Part of her was annoyed that the Doctor was spending so much time on that girl. But she'd said something, something important to him. Something that had gotten his attention in was that the words 'Torchwood' or 'Bad Wolf' never did.

Not that the Doctor explained what those words meant.

'In the name of peace and sanity'. Was that some sort of Time Lord password? Some sort of hidden phrase that only made sense to the Doctor?

The Doctor was back, his coat flaring behind him as he entered the console room.

"Anything?" Rose asked.

"Nah," he said. "Hasn't made a peep since Sarah Jane."

"Can't say I blame her, way you two came down on her," Mickey said, "You sure you're on the right with locking her up like that?"

"She knows things she's not supposed to. Secret things," the Doctor shot back, "I've had assassins aboard before, and the only reason why I'm still around was Turlough wasn't committed to completing the act. I can't trust her out here." He grabbed the console, twisting dials and flipping switches with a bit more force than usual. "Anyway, whatever her ploy is, it's not going to get anywhere from inside the Zero Room."

"If she's such a problem, why don't you just – y'know, space her?" Rose asked.

Mickey stared at her, but the Doctor just shook his head. "The TARDIS would just dump her in here if I jettisoned the Zero Room. It's a _failsafe_ ," he said.

"Listen to yourselves! You're talking about _murdering_ a person!" Mickey snapped, standing up. "Not only that, but someone who was helping you only yesterday! What, was she secretly a Slitheen or something like that Margret Blon? Oh, but murder wasn't the solution there, despite that one wanting to blow up the entire Earth and killing all kinds of people to make it happen. So what makes Delaine so 'space'-worthy? Eh?"

Silence followed the question as the Doctor turned away, only for everyone's attention to be called back to the console as a display started making noise.

"'s that a distress signal?" Rose asked, glad for the distraction. She just _knew_ that bringing Mickey along was going to be a pain.

"Yes. Big ship, big signal… out of the way though," the Doctor said as he analyzed the read out, "Diagmar Cluster. Probably why the TARDIS picked it up."

He pulled a lever and the sound of rematerialization was dully audible before the proper noise of a full stop thudded through the air. The Doctor gestured to the door. "First look for the newest member of the party."

Mickey hesitated before going to the door and carefully pulling it open. He peeked out.

"Looks like a proper spaceship to me," his voice echoed before he ducked back into the TARDIS. "Dead empty though."

"Really?" the Doctor asked stepping out, Rose following at his heel.

The room was massive, with high metal ceilings barely lit by the dull strips of light that ran along the edges of the floor. There was a fine coating of dust over everything and a musty smell that Rose couldn't quite identify, though it set her on edge by its presence alone. There was no sign of life anywhere.

The Doctor wandered over to a control console, picking up and discarding random loose pieces. "Looks like we had some cowboys in here. Ton of repair work going on, you'd think they'd run out of parts…" he looked at a faded display, pointing the sonic at it a couple of times to bring it back to some form of legibility, and then winced. "Well, no life signs anywhere, so apparently they did. That or food."  
"You always such a ray of sunshine?" Mickey muttered.

"The weird thing is… the warp drives are going and at full capacity. That's enough energy to punch a hole in the universe, yet… we're not moving." The Doctor looked up. "So where is all that power going?"

Rose sniffed the air. It smelled different. Not the musty smell that the rest of the ship seemed to have all over, but fresher. Almost like… "Someone cooking something?" she asked.

"Sunday roast, definitely," Mickey agreed.

The Doctor turned around, looking around the space before pressing a button on the console. A section of the wall opened and the smell only intensified. But odder than the smell was the room it was coming from.

"Well, there's something you don't see in your average spaceship," the Doctor said as he walked up to the fireplace. "Eighteenth century. French. Nice mantle."

He pointed the sonic at it and, after a few seconds, reached out to knock on it. Then he licked it. Rose ignored Mickey's cringe.

"Not a hologram," the Doctor said, "It's not even a reproduction. This actually is an eighteenth century French fireplace. Double sided. There's another room through there."

Rose stared at a porthole in the wall, through which she could see the stars. "There can't be. That's the outer hull of the ship. Look."

"Why hello," the Doctor said through the fireplace, his eyes fixed on something in the other room, "what's your name?"

* * *

I closed my eyes, trying to relax. The Doctor had been gone for… oh, only about five or ten minutes, but it felt like much longer. The room was messing with my senses.

Losing my mind in the Zero Room. Heh.

Where were they now? Girl in the Fireplace, I imagined, unless something extracanonical had snuck in. No, this was Mickey's first trip. It was the SS Madame de Pompadour for sure.

Would I have to interfere?

There was a faint fuzz in the back of my mind that felt like a nod.

TARDIS? Idris?

An echo of a laugh ghosted through my heart. Not the sound, but the sensation. The rattle of breath, the shake of shoulder. Like her own wheezing noise speed up.

She was conscious of everywhere and everywhen she'd ever been all at once. Of _course_ she'd know the name.

At least she wasn't part of the inquisition. Her contact was just that; contact. Ghosting and as gentle as a reassuring hand on my shoulder. She didn't have to worry about what ifs and whys and what could bes, because she already knew.

I relaxed a little. Maybe things wouldn't be so bad…

* * *

Mickey checked around the corner, hefting the space fire extinguisher to sit a little better in his hands. There was probably a reason they made them smaller and lighter on Earth, mostly because while this design was very cool – Mickey giggled a little at the pun –, they were also massively impractical. Seriously, it was like trying to lug Jackie around under his arm, 'xcept less kicking and verbal abuse.

"Don't see any creepy robots this way," he called back to Rose, only to see that she was poking around something else. "Rose?"

"Eh?" Rose asked, looking up from a display more than five meters down the hall.

Mickey made a face as he stomped over. "I'm trying to be helpful and keep an eye out for dangerous stuff. Least you could do is… y'know, _help_."

"Sorry, I was just looking at this." She pointed at a camera in the wall.

Mickey leaned in as he looked at it. "Looks almost like an eye…"

The camera blinked.

"Ew! It is!" he yelled as he jerked back, slamming against the far wall.

Something made a sound behind him. A familiar wet rhythm of lub-dub, lub-dub.

He moved away from the hatch it was coming from. "Rose," Mickey whined.

She moved towards it, slowly opening the little latch. "It's… it looks like a heart," she said slowly.

Mickey shut the hatch. "Let's get out of here."

Three hallways later, Mickey finally found his words again. "Maybe it wasn't a real heart," he said, more to calm himself down than to actually convince anyone of the fact.

"Of course it's a real heart," Rose replied, "What would be the point of putting a fake one in there?"

Mickey stopped, staring at her as she continued further. "Is this like normal for you? Is this an average day?" he finally asked.

Rose shot him one of her patented cheeky tongue-kissed grins, the one he'd fallen for in the first place. "Life with the Doctor, Mickey? No more average days."  
Mickey shook his head though he stopped as he saw the window.

It dominated the side of the hall and was a perfect showcase of the universe... or at least a small piece of it. Every possible color glowed against the backdrop of velvety black, but the primary palette was a study in red, violet, and blue, with slaps of hot pink peeking around the edges of billowing clouds bigger than Mickey's home system.

In the midst of that eruption of color, were a thousand, if not millions of stars. Pinpricks of light at this distance, some needle point tiny while others were the size of peas, but all of them were sharper than anything he'd ever seen above London. Light pollution, one of his teachers had said in school, kept all but the brightest stars from being visible over major cities. But there was nothing to compete with them out here in space.

"Lovely view, innit?" the Doctor asked from just behind the pair, "Two and a half galaxies away from earth, three thousand years into your future. What do you think Mickey?"

"It's… realistic. Probably would be enjoying it more if this place wasn't so creepy," he said before turning his eyes away from the skylight to look at the Doctor. "…why're you on a horse?"

"Probably 'cause it's real, yeah," Rose muttered before blinking as she realized that there was a horse and the Doctor was riding it.

"Why's pre-Revolutionary France on a spaceship?" the Doctor said as the horse leaned over to lip the corner of Mickey's shirt. "Get a little perspective."

"I'm not asking about the logistics, 'cause I kinda got that. I'm just asking why you saw the horse and decided that, ye, despite being in an enclosed space full of murder machines out to take everyone's bits, I'm going to get on top of an easily startled animal that barely fits in said space."

The Doctor looked down at the horse as if running through the thought process himself. "Ah," he finally said. "Yeah, that is a bit daft. Wait, clarify. 'Out to take everyone's bits'?"

"We found some… stuff. An eye in a camera, a heart wired into the machinery," Rose said, gesturing in the vague direction of Mickey's newest nightmares.

The Doctor blinked before running over to a section of paneling and opening it. He closed his eyes and then the hatch, apparently having found what he was hoping not to find. "I think we've found the crew," he said.

"Creepy abandoned ship in space, half-merged with 18th century France, filled with murderous robots, and the crew is part of the machinery," Mickey said almost feverishly as he clutched to his fire-extinguisher. "The hell kind of ship is this?"

The Doctor pointed at a mirror… no, a window further down the hall. On the other side, instead of a view into space, was a woman in clothes neither Rose or Mickey had ever seen outside of a costume drama. "The kind that thinks that stalking an 18th century noblewoman is the reason for its existence."

He walked closer. "Allow me to present Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, known to her friends as Reinette. One of the most accomplished women who ever lived. You might know her better as Madame de Pompadour."

Silence.

"You both slept through history class, I just know it," the Doctor muttered before raising his voice to normal tones again. "I'd say this is the night that she meets Louis the Fifteenth."

"She got plans of being the Queen?" Rose asked, studying the woman on the other side of the glass.

"No, he's already got a Queen," the Doctor said, "She's got plans of being his mistress."

"Oh, I get it; Camilla," Rose quipped, still watching Reinette with an odd look in her eye. "Bet the Queen just _loved_ her."

"She did, actually. They got on very well."

"The King's wife and the King's girlfriend?" Mickey asked. Hell, Rose hadn't been his girlfriend in over a year and she hopped all over him for even glancing at other girls.

"France is a very different planet where English cultural norms are concerned," the Doctor replied, still watching the scene unfolding in front of him. Suddenly, Reinette whirled around, creeping away from a figure that had been crouched in the corner.

The Doctor didn't even hesitate before hitting the switch that rotated the window. "Hello, Reinette. Hasn't time flown?"

* * *

Something had changed.

Not in the room. This room always stayed the same, sense-deadening and as quiet as death, but there was a sense of urgency thudding behind my heartbeat.

I looked up at the ceiling. "Time to go?" I asked the TARDIS.

There was no response, aside from the clicking of a lock releasing. In the end, that was all the answer I needed.

I stood up. "Thank you," I said, giving the empty room a small bow before I stepped out and started running.

Five corridors, nine rights, thirteen lefts, and a passing glance of a room full of cricket gear and I was out into the console room and then out of that.

Spaceship. High ceilings, stale air. People had died here, cornered and afraid. Cut to pieces without care as to agony or efficiency. Salvaged for 'spare parts'.

There were some spots where the fear 'glowed' more brightly than others. Those would be the robots.

And something had gotten their attention. The only living things on the ship that they could take apart for spare parts.

Mickey and Rose.

I ran faster.

A few of the robots were in the hall ahead of me, but they offered me all the resistance of wet tissue paper as I slammed them into the walls, ignoring the slice of the blades along my side. Scratch damage at best, compared to the brute force I'd applied to their heads. How long that would keep them down was the question. With the handcuffs, I wouldn't be able to fight at my unpowered best, but that wasn't enough to stop me.

There was a cry of 'MICKEY' down the hall and I forgot all about anything but getting there.

Which meant that when I slammed into the first robot and kicked a second down the hall, I wasn't much concerned with things like 'sharp pointy swords' unless it was me getting out of their general vicinity or putting them into things I didn't like.

I twisted around a thrust, grabbing one of the automations by its bladed arm and locking the handcuffs around it. The uneven edge of the metal bit into the plastic guard of the cuffs – and along the edge of my wrist, but that was irrelevant to the situation – and I was now fully committed to working around the clockwork piece of shit.

Still, I could work with that. It was a sword, a shield, and a bludgeon all in one with correctly applied force.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Rose screamed.

I ignored her, instead twisting around to catch a haphazard blade with a body that wouldn't bleed. From behind my shield, I kicked out, sending the offending machine flying a short distance away.

"I said –"

I shoved her out of the way of a sword with my foot, gaining a fresh cut across my thigh. "Shut up and focus on not getting stabbed!"

I kicked my robot's knee out, allowing the both of us to fall to the ground out of the way of Mickey's fire extinguisher. Three robots froze and one lost a leg to my next kick. Hypercooled metal is fragile, even if it is a future alloy.

"Thank you!" I snapped as I turned around again, my robot screeching as I dragged its exposed face and sword across the floor. As it finally crumbled under the strain, a thousand tiny gears falling through the grates below, I pulled my handcuffs free, noting that despite the abuse, they were still mostly intact, though the guard was now a shred of black plastic. "Alright, which one of you chintzy tinker toys wants to go next?"

* * *

The Doctor stumbled back through the time window. Part of it was an act, because otherwise he would have never escaped the French nobility and their love of debauchery, but he had a feeling he'd be paying for that party in the morning… for a few minutes at least. Perks of Time Lord physiology; the only time he ever got something that was even sort of like a human hangover was in the face of some very powerful drugs or a post-regeneration funk and neither – hopefully – would happen today.

Right now, the only trouble he had was strictly of a mechanical nature.

The Doctor stumbled over a bit of discarded machinery, which crashed and shattered all over the floor. "And I'm not paying for that," he told the wall before spinning around and breaking into song. "I could've danced all night, I could have danced all night…"

One of the droids crashed into the wall, head jerking erratically as the rest of it tried to assemble itself into a functional frame. The Doctor stepped over it gingerly, noting the other similarly wrecked robots around the room. A couple were damaged to the point of dysfunction, but most were still making the motions of the aggressor.

"And still have begged for more. I could've spread my wings and done a thousand things or mo–" he sang as he danced around the wreckage, only to cut off as he saw Rose, standing near the TARDIS with one of the fire extinguishers in hand. He grinned at her annoyed expression. "Have you met the French? My god, do they know how to party."

She didn't look at all amused. "Look at what the cat dragged in. The Oncoming Storm."  
The Doctor frowned, balancing his drink in his hand. "Oh, you sound just like your mother," he muttered.

She pointed the extinguisher right at his face. "Do you have any idea what's been happening here since you swanned off with Madame de Pompadour?"

"I'm sure you had it all handled," he said, pushing the nozzle away.

"No, I didn't, but apparently Delaine did!"

"What?" How did she get out of the Zero Room? "Did Mickey let her out?" the Doctor asked.

"Couldn't have. He was with me the whole time," Rose said, folding her arms, "We got cornered by some of the robots and she just came out of nowhere and started beating them up! I swear, if she didn't have that accent, I'd say she was from Glasglow. She _headbutted_ a robot."

Really? "Did she win?" he asked.

"Does it matter?"

"Not really," the Doctor lied. "Where is she now?"

Rose jerked her head across the room.

Delaine was there, sitting cross-legged on top of some crates, hands still handcuffed in front of her. She had been talking with Mickey, but as soon as she saw the Doctor across the room, she stopped talking and her face went blank before she turned to look at an empty spot on the wall.

He cringed internally before turning back to Rose. "Anyway, I've figured it out. The reason why they keep going after Reinette and scanning her brain. They're checking her milometer. They want to know how old she is… because this ship is thirty-seven years old and they think that when she is thirty seven, when she is 'complete', then her brain will be compatible with their computer. It needs a brain and for some reason, only the brain of Madame de Pompadour will do."

"Because that's the name of the ship," Mickey said.

"What?"

"The name of the ship is the SS Madame de Pompadour," he repeated.

"Who told you that?" the Doctor asked.

Mickey jerked his head back at Delaine.

"And how would _she_ know?" Rose said.

"Well, first, I assume that she knows how to read," he shot back, "because in between the attacks, she's been going through the ship's memory banks. You'd probably know that if you hadn't left us up here for FIVE HOURS."

Five hours… well, that spoke to how crazy the party was. France… lovely place, but not one to visit regularly. Not if one valued sobriety.

The droid that Delaine had thrown into the hallway leaned up, still far from being in the condition to walk. "The braaain is compatible."

"Shut up," the Doctor told the droid as he ran over to the console. Android master control was right about here, he figured before pulling the off switch. The remains of the droids around the room slumped, finally settling into a proper 'death'. "Anyway, time to get the rest of this nonsense shut down. Time window control is right here, all I need to do is…" he patted down his pockets. "Zeus plugs. Where are my Zeus plus? I know I had some because I was using them as castanets just a minute ago."

"If they needed her brain when she was thirty seven, then why didn't they just open a time window to when she was thirty seven, instead of all this hopping around?" Rose asked.

The Doctor shook his head as he fiddled with the controls, going through every possible combination to shut the system down. "Their circuits are so cooked, it's amazing they hit the right century. Trial and error probably pared it down after that… they aren't closing," he realized as he punched in the code again. "Why won't they –"  
A bell rang. It was a small bell, the sort that rang when a download was finished.

"What's that?" Mickey asked.

"I don't know…" the Doctor said looking over the system read out. "An… incoming message?"

"From who?"

He swallowed. "Report from the field. One of them must still be out there with Reinette. That's why I can't close the windows. There's an override. A… a failsafe."

That was inconvenient.

"She is complete," a robot whispered. The rest soon took up the chorus. "She is complete, she is complete, she is –"  
"Shut up!" the Doctor yelled, "None of you are in any condition to do anything about it! Message from one of your little friends, what are you going to do?"

"There are enough resources. She is complete. It begins."

A teleport signal registered on the sonic. Of course they had reserves. Big ship, lots of repair drones. Nothing could be simple, could it?

* * *

 

The Doctor caught Rose by the arm as she and Mickey ran towards the group. "You told Reinette everything she needed to know?"

"Yep," the blond replied. "You found it then?"

"They knew I was coming. They blocked it off," the Doctor said.

Before them was another time window, this time showing a ballroom filled with screaming bluebloods. They were being herded into a corner by the robots.

"How'd they get in if it's blocked off?" Rose asked.

"Teleport. So long as the ballroom and the ship are linked, the short-distance works well enough for their needs," the Doctor said.

"Can't you use the TARDIS then?"

"Can't do that, we're part of the event."

"What?"

"Imagine a ball of yarn. It's all tangled up and knotted and pinched together in really not good ways. That's this space ship, temporally. Trying to use the TARDIS inside of that tangle… it wouldn't just be forcing a new thread through the mess, it would be destroying it entirely. And while that's fine with an actual ball of yarn, this is a piece of space-time, which is kind of important not to be putting holes in."

"And we're not allowed to destroy pre-Revolution France," Rose said.

"Yeah, that would be bad," he said.

"Can we just smash through?" Mickey asked.

"Maybe. Would take a lot more force than we have on hand though. Hyperplex this side, plate glass that side –"

Delaine brought the horse in by the reins, handing them over without a word.

The Doctor looked at the horse.

The horse looked back.

"Yeah, that would work," the Doctor said, "Would have to figure out another way back, since once the time window is smashed, it's smashed for good."

"You'll find a way back. You're good at tricks," Rose said.

"Well, if I can't pull this one off, you're going to have to pull the return switch. Go back to Earth, I'll catch up with you there," he continued before shrugging and mounting the horse. "What's a couple centuries anyway?"

He pulled the horse around to face the mirror and goaded her into a gallop.

And then, for one hideous second, the universe shattered.

* * *

The Doctor, of course, returned. It had only taken five hours. Reinette had given him his final window of escape and he'd returned with a wide grin that did nothing but proclaim his own flawless victory. He'd gone back through the fireplace, however, and I knew that it wouldn't last.

Reinette had died. Tuberculosis, if I remembered correctly. A bad death for anyone, but nobody wanted to come back for someone and find out that they'd died in the interim.

I walked back to the Zero Room, ignoring the bite of the mangled handcuffs around my wrists or the looks that Rose and Mickey were giving me. Mickey's at least were shocked and offended on my behalf, while Rose's seemed more offended that I was still there at all.

If I only gave half a damn about what she thought about me, I might have been hurt.

Five corridors, nine rights, thirteen lefts, and a passing glance of a room full of cricket gear later, I was back in the room, sitting in exactly the same spot that I'd sat in all those hours ago.

Maybe I was making a point. Maybe I just didn't have a room of my own. Maybe I just didn't have anything better to do.

Two hours later, the Doctor came into the Zero Room for the fifth time since I'd come aboard the TARDIS. Without preamble he sat down in front of me and unscrewed a small tube of something he'd brought with him.

It was some sort of translucent blue paste, without any distinct scent I could pick out. He reached out to apply some blueish paste to my face, but he stopped as I glared at him.

I wasn't sure if his telepathy was strong enough to pick up the sentiment at distance, but I was fairly sure that it was fairly easy to parse the 'don't touch me' from my body language. Rigid, raised shoulders, limbs held in close to the body, every muscle tensed to lash out, a glare that could crack ice. Never looking away once.

The Doctor stared at me, his eyes only shifting to the various cuts once or twice. Some were superficial, like the one that sliced along my cheek, but others did run deep enough to be a problem. My hands, my side, along the outside of my right thigh. Nothing immediately lethal or crippling, though I doubted the mechanical menaces I'd been fighting off kept their equipment sanitized.

"You need medical care," he finally said.

True. Without some sort of regeneration or healing factor in play, at least half of my injuries required stitches or an equivalent space medicine. I just didn't want it from him right now.

Petty? Maybe. Probably. But that didn't mean it didn't feel like vindication.

"Still not talking to me?" The Doctor asked.

No, I've joined a nunnery and taken a vow of silence.

"I guess I can understand," he continued, "Can't say I like being locked up either."

Don't talk to me like I'm your friend. We are not friends. Not right now.

"I'm sorry."

You locked me up and interrogated me because of six words. You tried to invade my mind when I wouldn't talk. Even though I kept your friends alive, you haven't even tried to take the handcuffs off. Your apologies mean nothing unless you actually try to correct the behavior you're apologizing for.

'Sorry' doesn't count for _jack_.

"Really," I said dryly, speaking to him for the first time in… what? Two days? It might have only been one, but for the way that stress seemed to stretch things out. I hadn't had anything to drink since the entire event started. Never mind the blood that had come from… god, I didn't even fully know how I'd split my lip. Probably from distracting one of the clockworks with a headbutt.

Yeah, not the greatest tactical choice while wearing a fairly standard human body. The rest of my head still hurt from that.

He looked up. "Yes, really. You didn't do anything to deserve this."

Fuck it. I spat out a bit of half congealed blood, giving the grey-pink room another splash of color. Somehow, it didn't improve the atmosphere. "Except say the wrong thing to the wrong man."

The Doctor looked away again. "…Point."

The silence returned, stretching out the awkwardness.

"Fine," I finally said, stretching out my arms.

He smiled a little as he started rubbing the blue gel into the scrapes, slowly working from the storm of scratches on my fingers, hands and wrists up. It was cold, and I could feel the skin and flesh it touched tingle as the damaged areas knitted back together. I would be surprised if any scars were left afterwards.

"I could teach you. How to control the sensitivity, I mean," the Doctor said as he slid another swipe of the blue goo over the scratch on my cheek.

He figured I was time sensitive? Well, it wasn't _technically_ wrong. I could feel the flow of time, push it around a bit, and pick up the history of things if I wanted to. The fact that those powers all came from wildly different sources, only one of which was mildly related to Time Lords, and I'd long mastered them all only made the offer laughable.

"Not interested."

"Why not?"

I looked at him. Not the cold stare of before, but largely neutral with maybe a touch of bitter resentment.

You'd already been sitting down around low level trust – which, I will grant, might have been slightly unwarranted – but this entire event with the handcuffs and the attempted mind probe just kind of put you at a zero. The healing pushed it out of the negative, but only just.

Never mind that making that offer comes across as trying to put a price tag on what you did to me. Hell, the only reason why I didn't just leave at this point was because someone had to play both conscience and common sense to you.

"Because I don't _need_ to be taught anything by you, Doctor," I said.

"Ah," he said, falling into silence again as he finished applying the gel. "Will you be leaving then?" he asked.

I tilted my head as I thought about it.

It wouldn't be an unreasonable reaction. Honestly, part of me wanted to. I didn't much like Rose and the Doctor's behavior soured an already unsavory opinion of the Time Lord. But at the same time, I didn't quite feel like it. While Ten might have been one of my least favorite Doctors, I couldn't quite bring myself to say I hated him.

"No," I finally said. "I don't think so."

The Doctor smiled and began to remove the handcuffs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoosh, this was a quick update. 6,000 words in two days. Yeesh.
> 
> Okay, this chapter might have seemed a little extreme, but I kind of decided to approach it like this on account of a few different points.
> 
> The Time War (particularly anything concerning the War Doctor) is a real hot button issue for the Doctor. Nobody would know much in the way of detail about it unless they somehow escaped it and the fact that Delaine knows something that he – not just him, but the incarnation that he's tries to forget even exists – personally said is more than enough cause to freak the hell out from his point of view.
> 
> Ten is absolutely a 0 to 60 personality. There are no in between settings, except for maybe contrition and he really doesn't spend a lot of time in that zone.
> 
> Ten also freaks the hell out when someone comes anywhere near having his level of knowledge or power, though usually the circumstances don't exactly help.
> 
> He wipes Donna's memory (though it would kill her in the end, so I'll make that a half-point), sends his Metacrisis clone to another universe where TARDIS's don't work, and just generally doesn't react well to River Song at all (though he is sorry when she dies).
> 
> The only time he seems to react semi-favorably to another person being on his level is when it's another iteration of the Doctor (or someone he thinks is another iteration of the Doctor) and even that is a little higgly-piggly.
> 
> Also, do not forget that not only did he (in this fic, attempt to) dispose of a public figure for making a pragmatic but completely reasonable tactical decision in the face of an alien invasion, he also treated a close friend of his – Jack – like a monster for working with Torchwood, along with the fact that his existence very existence is a fact of the timeline, something that Jack has no power over.
> 
> Going off of all that, I wouldn't think it would be that difficult for the Tenth Doctor to lock up someone that he wanted answers from.
> 
> Also, as many have noted, Ten and Rose kind of act as an echo chamber to each other. He rarely, if ever, picks up on Rose's jealousy towards other women who have any sort of social rapport with him (Delaine would count), and I don't think I can recall any more than but one occasion where Ten even might have called her out on her behavior (the dimension cannon, I think. He might have just told her that it was dangerous, rather than a proper 'stop that'). They rarely if ever call each other out on bad or callous behavior towards others, which leaves someone outside the pair to call them out on their horseradish.
> 
> In this case, Mickey, who gets dumped on by both of them most of the time anyway, but Ten responds strongest to guilt, so it works anyway.
> 
> Okay, essay-slash-rant done. I'm trying to present Ten and Rose fairly here, despite any dislike for either of them. Professionalism, besides, y'know, this storytelling thing being mostly a hobby.
> 
> On another note, I appreciate the irony of 'just six words' changing everything in an entirely different context.


	8. Chapter 8

He could learn to enjoy this, the Doctor thought as he looked around the console room. Rose was sitting next to him in the control chair while Mickey and Delaine were playing some sort of card game on the floor. Something collectable, he thought, though it seemed relatively uncomplicated, given that Delaine only had to explain a handful of rules to Mickey over the course of six or seven rounds.

Rose seemed annoyed by the reintegration of the other girl, though the Doctor assumed she'd get over it. She'd liked Delaine well enough when she'd first joined. It would only take a few adventures to smooth over any lingering resentments –

The TARDIS shuddered, throwing the Doctor's train of thought off and everyone else to the floor as the lights dimmed and the console started smoking.

"What happened?" Rose yelled.

Oh no. Not again.

The Doctor ran over to a screen, trying to get some fleeting glance at what could have caused this. Another universe, one without access to the Time Vortex.

Just thinking about it stirred up echoes in the back of his memory. The sensation of massive heat at his heels as he ran for his life, the screams of people with familiar faces and unfamiliar histories just behind him as they fell to the lava flow.

"Doctor!"

No. He had to focus. They'd slipped past the dimensional barrier, had to figure out where they'd landed… if they landed at all. The TARDIS console exploded again, sparks showering over the entire group as the TARDIS flailed for some sort of foothold on reality.

"Time Vortex is gone!" he yelled as he pulled on different levers, trying to ride the shockwaves and remainder of her power, "We fell out of the universe!"

The TARDIS suddenly jolted, her natural spin halting as something vital simply failed to exist. The lights went out and the console went up in smoke as all the power in it exploded out and evaporated into…

Nothing. Nothing but the sound of circuits cooking and his hearts breaking.

"Can you fix it?" Rose asked.

"She's dead," he whispered. His oldest and closest companion, lifeless. "The last TARDIS in the universe, dead. You can't 'fix' dead."

Delaine reached out to touch the console. "She's not dead. Comatose, maybe, but she's still here," she said, "Won't be for long, if we can't get her back into her native 'verse."

"What?" the Doctor asked. How… telepathic, he realized. Delaine was telepathic, at least enough to be capable of having a 'conversation' with the TARDIS. That's how she got out of the Zero Room; she asked the TARDIS herself to open the door.

Was that a point for or against her?

"She's on reserve power and that's not enough for her to be able to take off again," Delaine said, opening her eyes as she released the console. "She's got a day or two left in her, but without an outside boost…"  
The silence was all the confirmation he needed. They only had a stay of execution, unless they'd managed to land somewhere solid or they managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Rose turned around. "Is there anyone we can call for help?"

"Even if we were in the right dimension, that wouldn't work. There's nobody left to call," the Doctor said, digging his hands around the still hot circuitry of the console, "We've slipped into the void. The dead dimension, the no space. There's no light, no sound, no matter…"

"Why's it look like London then?" Mickey asked from the door.

The Doctor spun around, running to poke his head over Mickey's shoulder.

It was London, but something tasted… wrong in the air. Pollution. Thicker than what he was used to for the year and location, the Doctor realized. "This isn't right," he murmured.

"London, England, Earth, first of February, 2007," Mickey said turning around on the pavement outside the TARDIS, a discarded newspaper in hand. "How's that after the big speech you made about 'the dead dimension'?"

"Except if it was your London, England, Earth, we'd still have access to the Time Vortex, thus avoiding the events of the last five minutes," Delaine pointed out before jerking her head to the sky, "but if you'll direct your attention upwards…"

The sky, a bright blinding blue, was filled by dirigibles of every size and description. Rigid, semi-rigid, and non-rigid models, mostly in shades of grey but occasionally emblazoned with logos that blazed like the sun. Some of them, the Doctor noted coolly, were kitted out for surveillance.

"What the hell."

Rose stood transfixed by the sight. "It's beautiful," she murmured.

"So it's London in a big international Zeppelin festival," Mickey said, not sounding entirely convinced by his own words.

"Try again," the Doctor said dryly. "This isn't your world."  
"Same date, same city…" Mickey said, clearly stumbling over his train of thought before coming to the realization at the end of the track. "Ah! So it's an alternate Earth, then, yeah? Different dimension, different version of Earth. Like things are mostly the same, but a little bit different. Sky's a different shade of blue, cats can talk, zeppelins..."

Delaine looked up from the newspaper. "And a few other things besides," she said, folding over the page before handing it over to the Doctor. "I'm not as up on geography as I could be, but I'm _pretty_ sure that Kent isn't supposed to have a volcanic crater."

Stahlman's Crater Reporting Record Activity, the headline declared before going into a brief bit of the caldera's history, starting from the destruction of the Inferno scientific camp in 1970 in a fiery accident while drilling into the Earth's crust and the problems with lava flows and poisonous gas emissions since.

The Doctor threw it aside quickly, trying to shove down the memory of the smell of burning flesh. "So this is an alternate Earth, as you might have all guessed by now. Where the point of divergence is, I couldn't say, but I've been here before and I can tell you this for certain; the government is either a fascist republic or post-fascist republic. Do _not_ get in trouble or wander into suspicious areas, because I've been here before and they are _not_ gentle with their interrogations."

"I like how you can figure out where you've been by identifying the craters you've left behind," Mickey muttered as he cast a glance at the paper.

"Heehee, you're such a funny little monkey," he bit back at the human before looking around. "Rose?"

Rose was standing a few feet away, staring into a screen bearing the visage of a rather familiar man.

"My dad's alive in this universe," she said, staring at the advert as it went through the motions of showing off some sort of fizzy tonic.  
Oh no. "Rose, don't look at it," the Doctor said, "Don't even think about it. Your dad died when you were six months old. This is not your Pete, this is a Pete. A Pete with his own daughter, who is not you. This is not your world, Rose, this Pete Tyler owes you noth–"

"But he's my dad," she said as she stretched out a hand to touch the ad, which suddenly erupted into noise.

"Trust me on this," the ad said, "Trust me on this."

"Alright, that's a bit weird," Rose admitted.

"Trust me on this."

"I have a small idea of what you're thinking and just let me say it; it's a bad idea," Mickey said, holding up his hands, "There's only two ways this can go, and I don't think Jackie is going to take the news of her husband's unknown lovechild or her daughter suddenly having a twin well."

Oh, if Mickey only knew what Rose did the last time she saw her dad alive, the Doctor thought. It'd been a daft move on his part, but at least this entire situation was an accident. And there was so much less chance for a paradox to get invoked. "Rose, don't –"

"What would you do if you found your parents, Mickey?" Rose asked, "What would you do? Huh, what about you, Delaine? If your dad was dead, wouldn't you want to see him again?"

Though she didn't say a word, Delaine's smile suddenly seemed very fake.

* * *

_Keep an eye on her_ , the Doctor had said as soon as it had become clear that Rose was going to wander off. That was fair. Rose Tyler kind of just… did stuff. Rarely was the stuff entirely good or done with any kind of logic in mind – at least any logic I could understand –, but that was coming from someone who didn't really care for her.

She probably had her good points… probably. Maybe. I hadn't really seen many of them, but I assumed that they were there.

"Shouldn't you be hanging off of the Doctor's arm?" Rose asked as she shot me a glare.

Someplace. Maybe hiding under a rock.

"Oh, I'd love to be helping with the TARDIS," I said. She'd tried to leave me behind a few times, but I'd managed to keep pace every time. Part of the benefit of having longer legs, part of simply being faster. "But the Doctor said –"

"To keep an eye on me. I heard," she said, "I take one look at my dad –"

"Not your actual dad," I reminded her.

"– and everyone just expects me to go swanning off after him to make up his absence in my life. Thanks for that," she finished, spinning around to sit on a bench.

Well, that was because that was exactly the sort of thing that you would do, Miss Tyler, not to mention that was pretty much your plan to begin with. "The Doctor said to stay put. And you didn't want to, so he asked me to go with you as to mitigate a number of worst case scenarios. It's called the Buddy System."

"We're not friends."

A wild understatement. "Maybe, but I'm not exactly going to ditch someone in an unfamiliar universe just because I don't _like_ her," I said, leaning against the back of the bench.

Any further sniping was cut off by Rose's phone buzzing. She fished it out of her pocket, quickly opening up the 'free trial period' screen to reveal a newscaster giving a special report on John Lumic, an inventor and business owner who apparently was the mind behind many different medical advances, including an artificial blood replacement, prostheses, and orthoses.

"The hell's an orthosis?" Rose muttered.

"In the straight Greek, it means 'to straighten' or 'align," I said as I watched the newscast over her shoulders, "But they probably mean orthoses in the context of leg braces, shoe inserts, maybe even full body exoskeletons."

That seemed like something pertinent. Wasn't this a Cyberman episode?

"You think you're so impressive," Rose said, giving me the stink eye for one blistering second before turning her attention back to her phone.

"I _am_ so impressive."

She blinked, glancing up at me. "What?"

I didn't answer.

* * *

The Doctor sighed as he pointed the flashlight down into the innards of his TARDIS. None of the backup power cells here had survived. She'd given her all to making sure they landed somewhere they could survive.

"Delaine said something about the TARDIS needing power," Mickey said, watching from just a foot or so back, "What sort of power does she need?"

"Oh, she's not particularly picky," the Doctor replied. "Seen her suck down electricity, siphon power off of a supernova… ordinarily, she gets just about all she needs from the universe's ambient energy. Problem is, she's not equipped for this one. Bit like putting diesel in a petrol engine."

"Fills the tank, but won't make her turn."

"Exactly."

They stared down into the guts of the console for a moment.

"How'd we get here then?" Mickey asked, "This sort of thing happen a lot? Like in the comic books, they visit alternate dimensions all the time."

"Aye, but that's comic books. This is actually happening," the Doctor said as he drummed his fingers. Did he want to talk about it? Well, it wouldn't hurt. "It's fairly impossible now, but it used to be easier. Back when the Time Lords were around, you could swan off to another dimension and be back with all the trouble it'd take to make a cup of tea. Now, the walls are a lot stronger… and a lot more fragile. Like the difference between glass and fabric. The glass is stronger…"

"But if you put a hole in it, you chance breaking the whole thing."

"Smarter than you look," the Doctor said.

"I get that a bit," Mickey said with a shrug, "Auto-mechanic living in an estate, raised by his grandmother 'cause his parents can't be bothered to stay around. Nobody ever expected much, but every now and then I have a good idea."

The Doctor fell silent for a moment. He had underestimated Mickey by a wide margin. The boy wasn't a genius by any measure, but he did help out more than he gave him credit for. And considering how well Adam had worked out, genius was a decidedly overrated trait anyway.

"Wait," Mickey said, drawing the Doctor out of his thought, "if travel between dimensions is supposed to be impossible, how'd we do it?"

The Time Lord blinked. That was the question, wasn't it? There had to be a crack, or a bolt hole, something they could have slipped through. They were headed to Earth, but usually the universe was fairly sturdy there. Relatively little going on in the way of time travel, save for himself usually…

The TARDIS abruptly hummed to life for a second before dimming down again.

That too should have been impossible… unless the two universes were overlapping somehow. Superimposing on each other for a moment in time.

"I think I can get us home," the Doctor said before pulling a notebook and a battered fobwatch out of his pocket, "Mickey, keep track of the intervals between the lights going on."

"What are you thinking?"

"The universes are having these moments where they're basically on top of each other, like two pieces of paper getting stuck together for a moment," the Doctor said as he jumped over to a tool chest and began pawing through everything inside. Stethoscope, lockpicks, sonic lance…

"We slipped through during one of those sticking moments, which means –" he pulled out a set of jeweler's tools and set them on the console. "There we go! –If we can get enough power and time it just right, we'll be able to slip back through without, y'know, killing everyone in both universes."

"Okay, wait – what do you mean, killing everyone?"

"I mean literally ending two universes. You didn't think that just 'breaking the glass' would just mean having two of everyone on every planet ever, right? Everything in these two universes would effectively cease to exist. Not enough room, differences in the rules of physics being irreconcilable…"

The Doctor checked through the tool chest again, just to make certain the most important thing he was looking for wasn't hiding in there. It wasn't.

"Ah, so you need the timing to be just right… and?"

"We need enough power."

"How're we gonna get that?" Mickey asked.

"Well," the Doctor said, jumping over the railing towards the area where he kept the 'probably going to repair the TARDIS with this junk in the future, so it's technically not clutter' items, "If I had access to a powerful electrical grid, I could pull off enough power to send us back across… mind, we'd have to cling to the console and leave the rest of the TARDIS behind, so yeah, scratch that, that's a terrible plan. But I might have something around that might be…"

He opened his repair scrap chest and started pawing through it. The Doctor had a vague idea of what he was looking for, but he'd only have the name when he actually found it.

Kind of a backwards way of going about things, but he wasn't going to tell anyone that – "Aha!"

The Doctor lifted up his find. It was a small crystal, about the size of a USB drive, but really, when did size count for anything? The Key to Time was the size of a jack-in-the-box and the Moment – No, bad path. Don't think about it. Don't remember it. The Doctor shoved the Moment back into the back of his mind and focused on the object he held between his fingers, which showed a tiny green spark glowing in its heart. Yes, it had just enough energy to work for his needs.

It was an artron crystal. The Time Lords had made these sort of things in the event of crossing over into a Vortex-incompatible universe. As long as it wasn't completely dead, you could feed just about any form of energy through it and it could convert it into something the TARDIS could use… provided, of course, you'd brought said energy from a universe with access to the Vortex.

Now was the question of exactly _what_ to feed it.

* * *

Of course Rose wanted to see her dad.

Five seconds with Google, or this world's equivalent of, and she'd discovered that she not only didn't exist, but her not-parents were filth rich.

Which, in Rose Tyler's mind, meant absolutely having to see them.

When the Doctor said we were stuck here for twenty four hours while the power recharged, she'd said she was going to meet them, no matter what anyone had to say about it.

"Can we just duct tape her to a chair?" I asked after giving the Doctor the short version of the story while Rose was in the wardrobe.

"Are you joking?" the Doctor asked, "All my duct tape is reserved for the purpose which it was intended; repairing things that I cannot or, alternatively, do not care to get fixed through appropriate channels. Like my chair," he said, flopping down into the command seat before giving me a goofball grin.

The grin turned into a brief flail of panic as the armrest he was leaning against fell off and the rest of him fell with it, leaving two twitching stick thin legs to point up at the TARDIS ceiling.

"Might want to reinforce that bit," I said as I leaned on the backrest of the chair.

"Yeah, the thought just occurred to me."

"Well, I'm ready to go… what are you two doing?" Rose asked as she walked back into the room and stopped to stare at the scene.

"Talking shop."

I smirked. "You could say thrift shop."

"Oi! I ripped this out of the plane myself."

"Somehow that's not reassuring."

"Banter, cute," Rose said flatly, "Anyway, if you two are too busy flirting, I might as well –"

"No! You can't just waltz into someone's life, just because they're an alternate version of your fam– Mickey, where are you going?" the Doctor asked.

"See my gran," he answered.

"MICKEY."

Mickey held his hands up in an appeasing gesture. "24 hours, Doctor. If she's alive, it'll just be a quick visit. She's free with the slaps, y'know?"

"I'm sorry, I've gotta go," Rose said and both ran outside the TARDIS and, even though this part was just a guess, in opposite directions.

"Uugh," the Doctor said, letting the back of his head bang on the floor, "I swear, this is why I only take one at a time anymore. Because then one person can't run in opposite directions."

"Who do you want to go after then?" I asked.

"The one that's going to make one hell of a mess if I don't stop her," he answered as he jumped up from the floor smoothly and pulled the lapels of his coat forward. "I think I can trust Mickey not to get caught up in anything stupid."

Something told me that within a few hours, Mickey would be caught up in something _extremely_ stupid.

It only took a minute to catch up to Rose and, of course, there was no way to talk her out of it. There was only trying to mitigate the fallout. In this case, sneaking in as staff rather than the high profile guests that Rose would have preferred.

In the distance, I thought I could hear the sound of Mickey Smith getting slapped by his alternate self's grandmother. Repeatedly. I had the feeling he would take it with a smile and eyes full of tears.

And then something stupid would happen to him.

* * *

The Doctor adjusted the bowtie on his tuxedo before grabbing a tray of drinks and waltzing on out of the kitchen. "Now, we're in."

"I hate you," Rose declared as she took up position at his side in her maid's outfit with hors d'oeuvres. It wasn't the most flattering iteration of the concept, but it was the sort of uniform used for serving the beautiful people; servants weren't allowed to outshine the stars. "We could have been anyone. Instead, Dame Rose is reduced to serving tiny sandwiches to rich toffs. Get enough of this back home."

"If you want to know what's going on, go to the kitchens," he explained, nodding over to a powerfully built black man surrounded by clearly political players, "like him over there. Lucy says that he's the President of Great Britain."

"Or maybe 'Lucy's' a bit thick," Rose bit back.

Green _really_ wasn't a good color on her, he decided.

The Doctor shook his head as they parted ways, melting into the crowd as they served the various figures and he started puzzling them out. Actress, actor, scientist, industrialist… mystery… oh no, a blackmailer. Spy cum reporter by the name of Oliver Threthewey, now he seemed like an interesting fellow, any physical resemblance to his Third notwithstanding.

"If it helps, Jackie named her yappy little lapdog 'Rose'," Delaine said as she drifted past him, shaking the Doctor out of his concentration. She'd opted for a tuxedo herself, as though the idea of leaving her neck exposed offended her on some level. Maybe it had something to do with the scars.

"It does, a bit," he replied around a snort, but she was already gone. Disappeared into some other room to serve some other toffs and troll for gossip.

And he was back to people watching again.

Writer, sports figure, model, model, gold digger, playboy, fascist, conman, and…

The Doctor caught himself before he could stumble over the yappy little dog that ran in front of his feet.

The man that had caught his attention was conspicuous, not by his mode of dress – not directly – but by the support apparatus that surrounded it. His entire body was supported by some form of brace or another, the dull bands of metal that wrapped around and creased the fabric of his severe suit, and on his chest was a breathing apparatus, tubes snaking out of it and into the interior of his suit.

He looked to be as much machine as man, save for the way he moved. Every step he took was slow, methodical and mechanical in execution and something about the eyes behind his Lennon sunglasses seemed cold. Like he was dissecting everyone else in the room and collecting an exhaustive list of their shortcomings and every way they could be 'corrected'.

It reminded the Doctor of the first Cybermen he'd ever seen, way back in his First incarnation.

"John Lumic," someone said as they walked up to the Cyber-esque Man, "It is a great privilage to meet the greatest inventive mind of the modern era."

"Your warm greetings are noted. I returned to have my latest creation approved by the government, but unfortunately my offering… was cast aside," Lumic said, his voice toneless and droning around the clipped delivery of the words. Cognitively, the Doctor knew that it was probably an aspect of the breathing apparatus, but it recalled the Cybermen once more.

"That's a pity, your work has really revolutionized the world…"

The conversation trailed off as the Doctor moved away, slowly losing the drinks on his tray as he tried to regain his nerve. There were no Cybermen here. There was no threat of people being reduced to mechanical horrors, only capable of moving forward under the orders of their Cyber Commander.

Still, something about it niggled.

So as the last of the champagne disappeared from his tray, the Doctor made plans to snoop around. Hopefully the niggling feeling was just that; a feeling, but he wasn't the type to ignore his instincts.

* * *

In the distance, a van approached. Inside was the stuff of nightmares, rendered in silver and steel.

The Cybermen were coming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unlike the last chapter, this one beat my ass before coming together and even then, it's going to end up being a two parter. And a third of the word count is this Author's Note (available in full on the Fanfiction.net version of this story).
> 
> I'm sorry about that.
> 
> This was mostly because I was trying to figure out how to work the first time the Doctor ended up in an alternate universe on accident (Inferno, Third Doctor – imagine the Star Trek episode where all the evil ones had goatees, but make it the Brigadier without his mustache and also a fascist), but also because part of me wanted to skip to Love and Monsters.
> 
> Why?
> 
> Because I've got an idea and an image that's been crawling into the back of my skull since I bought InuYasha volume 3 for eight bucks back in 2004, and even after that volume was reduced to a decomposed book-shaped pile of goo thanks to my asshole dad's disregard for the personal property of others, the nightmare still remains.
> 
> Just like that one scene in the Mummy remake where the guy was eaten from the inside out by the scarabs. Heh, that was some scary shit and I can't believe my grandma let me, an easily impressionable five year-old at the time, watch it.
> 
> Also, on a lighter note, my horror-loving grandma was going nuts on making pecan tassies for Christmas. We made like… ten or twelve dozen. They're delicious but hell, that's like 120 tassies at least. That's way more than four tens.
> 
> And that's terrible (I'm so sorry, I'm nothing but bad memes when I'm tired).


	9. Chapter 9

I've never been very good at self-imposed challenges.

Part of it was that they were usually pointless, but mostly it was because universe always liked to pick out those moments to point out why trying my hands behind my back was a terrible, no good idea.

Some of them, I supposed, were fair. Focusing on learning how to use a new power effectively, seeing if I could make a system more efficient, those sort of things paid off. Trying to pretend that I couldn't do things, especially when those things could have saved people's lives?

That was a stupid exercise, even when I legitimately couldn't do anything. Yet, I did it every so often. I'd take my small cheats, but I'd never break out the flash until absolutely necessary. I tried to keep myself somewhat… level with the world around me, not standing out as anything unnatural.

But, tonight, I could. I'd taken off my limiter as part of my disguise as a server. As easily as eyes might glide over servants, details like leather wrist bands tended to catch them. Besides, I could turn off my powers without it… they just tended not to _stay_ off once I started thinking in goals and trajectories.

Which – while not always conductive to maintaining a low profile – suited me just fine now, since the passive set allowed me to recognize and identify the loud clang and whirr of robotic marching on the perimeter of the property. This _was_ a Cyberman story – no, event, it was a Cyberman event, it's real now, not a story – and Cybermen were nothing if not resistant to mundane force.

But there was nothing mundane about me tonight and, if it came down to it, I could always call on myself for backup.

…actually, that was a better option one. Even though that 'ability' would call up at most three past versions of me from previous Jumps without my own wide range of abilities, some of them were strong and specialized enough on their own that even a whole platoon of Cybermen wouldn't stand a chance.

And nobody would even think to look at me and have the thought 'what sort of freak are you?' cross their minds. Not for a long while yet, at least.

I mentally scrolled through the list of likely options as I served up the last of my champagne.

'Chindi' would work the best, even though I had so very few good memories in association with that incarnation. Being infected with a vocal cord parasite, losing an eye, removed of all their limbs, having said limbs be replaced with _mostly_ functional robotic prosthetics, and then having what little body they had left surgically removed in favor of being a brain in a robot suit was never anyone's description of fun, even without having to be a corporate 'mascot' at the end of it. They were well trained in cyborg disassembly, their own robotic body built fast and strong enough to outpace anything the Cybermen could throw out.

There were others I could back them up with and there was always the chance of those numbers being backed up with companions. At least two Jedi incarnations with the means to shut down robots of any stripe, never mind being able to 'hack' any remaining mind. The Irken Dei would have entirely too much fun with the chaos, and they had spent that entire jump cosplaying Four so that would be a hoot at least. A half-crazed undead ham of a magical warrior with more guns than the average American military outpost and a probable cadre of magical girls at her heel wouldn't be out of hand either, though I loathed to bring them into this mess. Maybe the Terminator Jump –

No, bad idea. Ten didn't like guns. Alex didn't like competition for 'Smartest Ass In The Room'. It would only end in tears… or a murder. Yes, definitely the second.

I cut back to reality and felt the world around me.

The Cybermen were just outside, only a few steps away from the windows. How no-one had noticed the sound of metal feet stomping in near perfect synchro was beyond me, but the party still spun on. The Doctor and Rose, however, were nowhere…

Oh, there was Rose now, wandering around with a spectacularly upset look on her face. She had spoken to the local Jackie, I took it.

And the Doctor was upstairs, attention focused on something on a laptop –

Before I could focus on getting a better idea of exactly what he was looking at, his head jerked around in my general direction. I shut off the power, as if that would change the fact that he'd picked it up in the first place. How?... scratch that, half of what I did was psychic and my 'scan' was everything I could manage to do in the name of supernatural detection, including those abilities. Time Lords were psychic. Not terribly, if I remembered correctly, but psychic enough to know when a honking great elephant of a scryer was looking over their shoulder, trying to get a look at the thing that had their interest.

Some of the past Jumps had spoiled me. Places where nobody could figure out the strings I was pulling… and places where I didn't have to lie.

I bit my tongue as I slouched back into the kitchen to drop off my empty tray. Cybermen outside there as well. There had to be at least forty around the house, if not a hundred. The fact that they'd stopped moving and didn't have distinct 'life signs' made it hard to get a bead on them.

But a hundred. Even the old incarnations that I was going to bring to the party might not be enough, because without the access to overpowering force that I alone had access to, they'd have to stick to what they had; solid skills, to be honest, but not the lightning speed I could manage at full tilt. People would die. Maybe less than in canon, but I'd still prefer the casualties be none at all.

I sighed, dragging a hand down my face.

"You alright?" a member of the staff asked. Nice girl, long brown hair, hazel eyes. Lucy, I remembered. The Doctor had magnetized her the moment we'd infiltrated, but even Rose's glares hadn't managed to dent that smile.

"Yeah, just… lot of pressure going on," I said, giving her a small, if undeniably tired smile.

"Oh, I know the feeling," she said in a commiserating tone, "You want me to take over for you a bit?"

"Nah, I think the toffs are all well liquored up for the moment," I lied through my teeth, "I'll be right in a moment. Honest promise."

Lucy gave me another smile before going around fixing a fresh tray to carry out into the party.

Fuck it. Go crazy. Call backup. Smash some metal motherfuckers. Dispense with the pretense that I'm anything close to human at this point, at least for a little while.

Just keep that smile from getting broken by the Cybermen.

Yeah, I could call that a fair trade.

* * *

 

The Doctor rushed out of the room, leaving the laptop with the positively damning recording behind. Cybernetic synapses, impulse transfer from material brain to an all-encompassing exoskeleton of steel, the 'ultimate' upgrade… all of it screamed Cybermen. It didn't matter that the President had turned Lumic down. Mundane things like 'permission', 'consent', and 'ethics' didn't stop megalomaniacs with a vision.

This wasn't an alternate Earth. The Cybermen had never started on Earth. No, they'd started on her sister planet.

This was an alternate Mondas.

The feeling of being watched had sent him to the window. Just to check, he had told himself. It was just a superstition, nothing more than a shiver running down his spine. The horde of shiny metal bodies standing just outside the house had only turned that shiver into a soul-crushing chill.

Cybermen.

He needed to find Rose and Delaine.

The Doctor darted out of the room, trying to marry speed and subtlety as best as he could. So long as the house wasn't fully surrounded, they weren't dead.

Windows and doors started breaking and the Doctor knew that it was.

"I suppose a remark about 'crashing the party' would be appropriate," a voice droned from downstairs. Despite its tonal sterility – somewhere between a text-to-speech device and an electrolarynx in sound –, there was an air of the sarcastic and dismissive about it.  
Lumic.

The Doctor twisted around a doorway into the drawing room and saw the man in question surrounded by Cybermen.

No. No no no no no. "It's happening again," the Doctor whispered.

"What do you mean?" Rose asked from just behind him.

Good, one companion accounted for. "I've seem them before," the Doctor said, searching around the room for Delaine. Where was she?

"Mister Lumic," The President said as he stepped forward, every bit of his body language firm and unafraid. How much of that could be chalked up to ignorance of what was standing in front of him? "I believe I forbade this."

"You would deny my children?" Lumic said.  
"What are they, robots?" Rose asked.

"Worse. Cybermen," the Doctor said, looking around the room again. "Where's Delaine?"

"Who were these people, Lumic?" the President asked coldly. So he knew that much.

"Does it matter?" the inventor asked as he reached up to caress the unfeeling lines of a Cyberman's faceplate.

The Doctor wondered if there was even a face under there anymore.

"Those things… those were people?" Rose asked, casting a fearful glance at the Cybermen. So she was starting to get the idea of what they were and what was about to happen.  
The Doctor grit his teeth. "They were… at least until 'Mister' Lumic there decided to cut all of the humanity out of them. All that's left is a living brain stripped of emotions and free will, shoved into a little jar to pilot a cybernetic body powered by a heart of steel."

"Why no emotions?" she asked.

"Because it hurts. Because they're soft. Because they're weakness. It's all the same to some people." He'd known too many who took that view.

The President stepped forward. "I demand to know, Lumic. These people, who were they?"  
Lumic tilted his head, scanning the rest of the room.

"The homeless. The useless. The wretched refuse of mankind. The abortions of civilization… until I made them into something more. And you, all you grand gilded fools who think that you're so kind and generous to the 'common man'… you never even realized they were gone," the man's face twisted into a gross parody of a smirk before he continued, "I took them and turned them into the future and gave them… life eternal. And now I leave you in their capable hands. Goodnight… Mister President."

The Cybermen parted to let their creator pass between them and he strode mechanically into the darkness of the night.

"I'm so sorry for what has been done to you," the President said to the closest Cyberman.

"We have been upgraded," it intoned, "There is nothing in that which requires an apology."

"Upgraded into what?" a man asked. Threthewey, the Doctor remembered. The lookalike to his Third self and apparently possessed of a similar spine. It was a pity the man would likely die tonight.

"The next level of mankind," the Cyberman said, "We are Human Point Two. Every citizen will receive a free upgrade. You will become like us."

The mood of the room, while tense and laden with latent fear before, suddenly spiked with the threat.

"This experiment ends tonight," the President declared.  
"Upgrading is compulsory," all the Cybermen said together.  
"And if I refuse?"  
Oh no. This was the point where everything went from simply bad to people dying. "Don't."

"What if I refuse?" the President asked again.  
"I'm telling you, don't," the Doctor said louder. If this kept going, the Cybermen wouldn't just kill the President, but everyone else in the room. If any out of those survived, they'd be converted, but that was a very big 'if'.  
"What _happens_ if I refuse?"  
The Cyberman stared down at the man. "Then you are not compatible."  
The President didn't look away. "What happens then?" he asked.  
"You will be deleted."

* * *

 

Six. Seven.

By the time the screaming started, I was already lightning, running around the house systematically shutting down every Cyberman I came across. Outside, Chindi and Red were likely doing the same, while Dei… well, he was likely causing wanton destruction as well, though he could just as easily be hacking into their systems.

Ten. Twelve.

My only concession to anonymity was a mask. Not one of the transformation set – no, those I kept 'internally' nowadays – but simply one that I'd picked up on one of the feudal Jumps. A gift from the princess of the forest spirits. A face fitting for a force of nature rendered flesh.

Fifteen – sixteen – eighteen. I'd say that I'd be losing count at the speeds I'm going, but I'm not.

Twenty-one.

I was lightning in body, mind, and soul. Less than a thousandth the speed of light and all the destruction of the storm, I miss nothing, not even my count. A physical strike from me is enough to make a battleship buckle. The lightning running through my veins is enough to illuminate cities of millions.

Creatures of vulgar steel cannot withstand that.

Twenty-five.

The beads clattered as I slowed down to speeds a human could appreciate, transferring all of that kinetic energy to a Cyberman. Unlike me, its flight out of the window was uncontrolled and would likely leave it in pieces as soon as something interrupted said flight.

Twenty-six.

I spared a glance at the cyborg's would be victims, rattling the beads again with the motion. It probably was a proper sight, the long white wig and painted clay mask over an otherwise spotless tuxedo. The fact that I'd dispensed with my shoes in favor of barefoot traction probably didn't help either.

Lightning didn't care about people, whether it struck them or not. I was no longer lightning and they were simply scared.

"Take out your ear pods," I said, "Find anyone you can and get out. They'll probably be able to track you through the Cybus systems."

They stared at me and I resisted the urge to sigh. Humans, always a gamble when you'd catch a set with common sense during a crisis.

I _was_ human, a little voice scolded.

Mostly, another corrected before another chimed in with a bitter 'barely'.

"Please," I said.

They finally did, shaking hands tearing the pods out of their ears and throwing them across the hallway. I nodded and then started running again. There were still Cybermen to destroy.

Twenty-seven.

* * *

 

The Doctor ran outside, dragging Rose along behind him as he tried to get away from the cacophony of screaming, stomping, and breaking glass.

He was very good at running. How many had died in the last three minutes because they hadn't?

There was nothing he could do, he told himself. Feel guilt later, when it won't slow you down.

As a line of Cybermen walked out of the forest, he changed his trajectory. He had to get Rose away from them. If she was still in the house, Delaine was probably dead already.

Guilt later.

"My mum!" Rose yelled, pulling away to go into the house again.

"She's not your mother, come on!" the Doctor yelled back at her, not letting go of her wrist. The house was a death trap, full of Cybermen and dead end rooms to herd people into. He wasn't going to let Rose run back in there. Not now. Not when they needed to be anywhere but here.

He pulled her around the corner of the house, towards the open lawn, but that was already blocked by an advancing wall of steel.

No. No no no no no.

The Doctor spun on his heel and dragged Rose back around the building. He wasn't losing this companion. Not like this. There had to be a side gate. Some way out that wasn't blocked off.

A man jumped out of one of the first floor windows; this world's Pete Tyler, literally the only reason they were out in this situation. Part of the Doctor would have _loved_ to blame him for the death of a companion, but no. He'd reserve that for Lumic and his Cybermen.

"Quick, quick!" Rose yelled at the salesman as they started running again.

"Pete, is there a way out?" the Doctor asked.

"The side gates," the man gasped before fixing hazel eyes on the Doctor. Yes, the Doctor could see where Rose got hers. "Who are you? How do you know –"

"You wouldn't believe me in a million years," the Doctor said, cutting him off as another group of Cybermen coming around the other side of the house.

Another way out, gone. And the Cybermen just kept multiplying.

Thirty at the least. Maybe more.

This wasn't good. This was so far from good it qualified as a new country in on the continent of Awful.

Suddenly, a set of floodlights turned on, revealing the outlines of two crouched shadowy figures with guns.

"Who's that?" Rose asked.

"Get behind me!" Mickey said.

Wait, what? Mickey?

The Doctor didn't allow his abject confusion keep him from moving behind the pair before they opened fire on the Cybermen, bullets pinging off of their metal bodies like pebbles. A useless gesture, even in another universe. The shooters rose, staring at the lack of carnage on the other side of their guns.

Ah. UNIT all over again.

"Oh my God, look at you," Rose cooed as she hugged Mickey. "I thought I'd never see you again!"

'Mickey' – who the Doctor was beginning to suspect wasn't – looked absolutely disgusted with the display of affection. "Yeah. No offence, sweetheart, but who the hell are you?" he asked.  
A fresh Mickey jumped out of the brush, this one without a gun. "Rose! That's not me. That's like the other one."

Oh. Alternate universe, right. "Two Mickey's, a horde of Cybermen, and Delaine missing. Just what I wanted in a day," the Doctor muttered.

"It's Ricky," Mickey's doppelganger spat.

"But there's more of them," Mickey said looking at the approaching Cybermen. "We're surrounded."

Ricky's friend moved to shoot again but the Doctor grabbed the gun. He forced the barrel down, ignoring the sensation of hot metal.

"Bullets won't stop them," he said, "More likely to kill us with the ricochet, actually."

He looked up at the Cybermen, who'd finally stopped. Just out of arms range, but how long would that last? It was too late for side gates, they were truly trapped.

So this was how it ended. Surrounded by the Cybermen of another universe, without even the smallest chance to buy time to think of a plan or hope of escape. He didn't even know of his other companions were even alive at this point.

How very stupi–

Something punched through a Cyberman's chest and, for a single instant, the Doctor registered the image of a metal fist drenched in black oil and foamy white blood and clenching what could only be the Cyberman's 'heart of steel'.

It was only for half of a second, because then the hand was gone again, pulled out with only the scream of protesting steel and a gaping, gushing hole to mark that it was ever there. And then another Cyberman was down, arm ripped off at the shoulder and a massive gouge in its side spraying black oil, blue coolant, and white blood while the four next to it simply fell apart, sliced cleanly in half. The only warning of a blade had been a small explosion, almost lost in the confusion.

A ballistic sword? That was just daft… but it was the only thing the Doctor could think of in the face of the evidence.

The remaining Cybermen stepped back, heads swiveling as they attempted to locate whatever creature was picking them off. What was going on?

The Doctor was able to track it, though only just enough to catch glances as it tore through more of the Cyberman horde. Some kind of robot or cyborg, he was certain. It wasn't a Raston Warrior Robot, though. There wouldn't have been a blur to follow. And the Cybermen that had been cut in half, leaving nothing but a glowing stump of a torso… was it some sort of laser cutter? No, there would have been a light to follow and time spent actually making the cut. Something else then.

Something fast, something strong, something on their side… or at least not on the side of the Cybermen.

Somehow, the Doctor found, that wasn't comforting.

"While I'm sure that this show is very entertaining," a new, half-familiar voice drawled from behind the group, "you really should be running."

* * *

 

I ignored the sound of a gunning engine outside. There were still people alive here, still Cybermen to kill, and I hadn't found Lucy yet. Maybe she was one of the bodies that had been burned too badly to identify, maybe she was still alive.

I'd worry about it once I was done here.

Red ran through a side door, a wide grin splitting her face as she called a fresh rifle into existence and made four fresh sizzling holes in a Cyberman's chest. It wasn't hard for her to smile like that; she hardly had a face to begin with and at this point in that incarnation's 'life' – or at least whatever counted as such for that universe's definition of magical girls – the decay had advanced from what had started out as merely a diseased version of a kuchisake-onna to something only rivalled by the Master in his crispiest incarnation.

The rest of her body was in no better shape, either, but that had never stopped me… no, her from getting shit done, despite looking like the bastard child of a zombie and a strip of beef jerky.

"Chindi and Dei broke off with the high-priority squad," she rasped around her teeth as she cocked her gun. A purely ornamental gesture, since she neither carried nor needed mundane bullets. "Y'wanna clean up here and go after them?"

I opened my senses and felt out the property. Still a couple dozen Cybermen left, mostly on the outside perimeter, and a few more humans still alive, hidden in cupboards and the like. Further away, a van was speeding and it was loaded with living things, the Doctor shining the brightest of the bunch.

"Sure," I said, opening my eyes, "Shouldn't take us more than fifteen minutes."

I pulled a coin out of my pocket, flipping it in the air before turning around and launching it at near supersonic speed through a Cyberman's primary battery, which promptly exploded.

Forty-two.

* * *

 

The pea-green alien dressed as his Fourth – it was an alternate universe where Rose was a dog, this could be his actual equivalent – grinned, showing off a set of glossy pink teeth that looked like they belonged in a zipper rather than a mouth.

"Having fun?" it asked.

Let's see, the Doctor was packed into a tiny van full of guns, soldiers, an alternate universe version of his companion's father, and an alien that seemed to think that the entire situation was some kind of cosmic hoot while a robotic war machine that was only nominally on their side rode around on the roof…

"Not really," the Doctor replied before going back to studying the alien across from him.

Whatever species it was, it wasn't one that the Doctor had seen before. Not entirely dissimilar to the Malmooth or the Charrl, he supposed, but definitely not an example of either species. There were enough insectoid traits; the antennae, the glossy eyes, only three clawlike digits on each hand… but it did lack the exoskeleton and the mandibles most of those insectoid species possessed.

Maybe it was one of those 'little green men' he'd always heard about from the conspiracy theorists. Except this one wasn't exactly little. Thinner than some rails, yes, but nothing else was 'little' about it. It had to be at _least_ the same height of his Fourth, if not more and that was without counting the antennae into that final figure.

Said antennae twitched as it studied him in turn. "Never seen an Irken before?" it finally asked.

"A what?"

"If you don't know, you haven't missed much," it said, flicking out a long, segmented tongue. "They almost made _me_ their supreme leader but for that last centimeter, so that tells you just about everything you need to know."

No it didn't. It didn't explain anything. What did a centimeter have to do with holding office? Was this what it was like for the humans he introduced himself to? Just complete and total bafflement at the habits of the Time Lord?

"Don't see why we brought Tyler along. He's nothing but dead weight," the spike-haired boy said, dragging the conversation in other directions.

"Hey! Leave him alone," Rose snapped, "What's he done wrong?"

"Oh, you know, just laid a trap that's wiped out the Government and left Lumic in charge."

"You think I would turn my wife's party into an ambush? With her still inside?" Peter asked angrily.  
"Why not? People have done worse to get rid of the ol' ball and chain. And even if not, plans go wrong all the time. Jus' because you lost someone in the shuffle doesn't mean we won't execute you."

"Talk about executions, you'll make me your enemy," the Doctor warned, "And take some really good advice; you don't want to do that."  
"Or what, you're going to strangle me with your bowtie?" the spikey one asked, "We've got evidence that Peter Tyler's been working for Lumic since twenty one five."

"Is that true?" Rose asked, sounding betrayed.

She shouldn't have, he wasn't really her dad. If anything, the Doctor should have been the one feeling betrayed. Delaine was likely dead or worse on account of the whole scheme.

"Oooo, drama," the alien said as it pulled a paper sack out of its pocket and tossed a jelly baby into its mouth.

"Tell them, Mrs. M," Ricky said.

The woman, the apparent 'Mrs. M', continued speaking. "We've got a government mole who feeds us information. Lumic's private files, his South American operations, the lot. Secret broadcasts twice a week."  
"Broadcast from Gemini?" Pete answered, looking almost regretful that the information was common knowledge among this group.

"And how do you know that?"

Pete rolled his eyes. "I'm Gemini. That's me."

Mickey's doppelganger sneered. "Yeah, well you would say that."  
"Encrypted wavelength six five seven using binary nine," Pete shot back, "That's the only reason I was working for Lumic. To get information. I thought I was broadcasting to the Security Services. What do I get? Scooby Doo and his gang. They've even got the _van_."  
The Doctor couldn't argue with that. He'd been in better vans than this decades before half the people in it were even born.

"No, no, no," Mickey said, "But the Preachers know what they're doing. Ricky said he's London's Most Wanted."

The Doctor's eyebrow rose almost involuntarily. Mickey Smith, even an alternate universe Mickey Smith who was definitely less likable than his usual, competent terrorist?  
Ricky winced. "Yeah, that's not exactly."

"Not exactly what? "  
"I'm London's Most Wanted for… for parking tickets."  
Pete managed to look even less impressed than before. "Great."

"Yeah, they were deliberate. I was fighting the system. Park anywhere, that's me."

And the Doctor was content in knowing that, once again, he'd called the situation correctly. "Good policy. I do much the same. I'm the Doctor, by the way, if anyone's interested."  
"And I'm Rose," Rose said waggling her fingers, "Hello."  
Pete groaned. "Even better. That's the name of my dog. Still, at least I've got the catering staff on my side."  
Rose positively beamed. "I knew you weren't a traitor."  
"Why is that, then?" Pete asked.

The Doctor shot her a look. Do _not._

"I just did," she said, carefully not looking at anyone.

A few awkward moments of silence passed as the van sped along the road to London.

"They took my wife," Pete said abruptly.

"She might still be alive," Rose said.

"That's even worse," he said, leaning his head against the side of the van, "Because that's what Lumic does. He takes the living… and he turns them into those machines."

So, Pete Tyler had seen it. In person or simply the presentation that had been on his computer, he'd seen it and understood what Lumic was capable of.

"Cybermen," the Doctor said, "They're called Cybermen. And I'd take those ear pods off, if I were you. You never know. Lumic could be listening."

Pete's hand went up to his ear, but the Doctor was faster, pulling the metal plugs out and deactivating them with the sonic screwdriver. "He might just be a businessman with delusions, but that doesn't make the Cybermen any less dangerous. We'll be lucky to get everyone out alive tonight."

"Oh, don't sell yourself short. You've got me and Chindi on your side," the alien said, tossing another jelly baby into the air before snagging it with its tongue. Segmented _and_ prehensile, the Doctor noted though nobody else seemed to share his interest. Rather, the emotion in the van was disgust. "Odds like that, that's almost as bad as cheating."

"'Chindi'?"

The back door opened up and the robot from before dropped in, landing on the floor in a crouch before shutting the door behind it. Polite, if nothing else.

The alien nodded at the robot. "You might know them from such roles as 'the shiny ninja', 'destroyer of Cybermen', and 'the guy who saved all your butts half an hour ago'."

"Chindi? Is that Indian?" Pete asked.

"Diné," the robot said, its voice as dry and raspy as windblown desert sand. It stepped towards the green alien, who moved over enough to let it sit. "Have you even attempted to behave, Dei?"

"That would imply that I am not a defective, Chindi, and we can't have that piece of misinformation floating around, can we?" the alien, now identified as Dei, said.

It was almost innocuous, the sight of the robot – so shiny and obviously deadly – sandwiched in with the motley group of humans and extraterrestrials, sheathed sword clutched between its hands and knees like it was holding onto the support pole of a subway car.

It would have been easy to forget that it was clearly a killing machine.

The Doctor studied it coolly. Not quite as tall as a Cyberman and nowhere near as heavily built. No, where the Cybermen opted for crude hydraulics, this one was designed thoughtfully, almost… artistically so, if not fully originally. The 'muscles' were clearly artificial material mimicking natural structure, probably carbon nanotubes, and there was the faint pulse of pale blood running through artificial veins.

The hair, he couldn't figure out.

There was no point to it. It wasn't just there; it was as long – if not longer – and as well-maintained as Rose's, though it was clearly thicker and heavier besides being charcoal black. If the machine had a proper face, it might have worked, but all that was there was a smooth visor…. Wait.

No. There was a seam. Hairline thin and nearly invisible, but it was there and conspicuous by its very presence.

The Doctor lifted up the sonic to open it when the thing finally spoke.

"You could ask," it said. The voice didn't sound right, though it wasn't the disharmonious computer tones of the Cybermen. Was that because it wasn't maintained or that its owner barely used it?

"What's your make, model, and designation?" he asked.

It didn't reply, though it shifted its head to look out the windshield.

The Doctor gritted his teeth before rephrasing. "What are you?"

It looked back at him, tilting its head slightly to the side. "Did Dei get this interrogation?" it asked after a long pause.

"I need to know if you're human or machine," he said, tucking away the information of the other alien's name. The casual phrasing of the question was shoved aside.

"One could say both."

"Cyborg then."

It rolled its head to the side again, watching the road ahead. Well, the Doctor could only assume it was watching the road. There was no telling behind that visor.

"Not much for conversation, are you?" Pete said around a fake and quickly chipping smile. Sandwiched between the daughter he literally never had and a cyborg that could tear through armies while his wife was probably being converted into the likes of its victims… well, the Doctor didn't envy the seating arrangements.

"Got out of the habit," it said, turning the minimum of requisite rotation to look at the salesman.

"Why?"

"Got sick. Parasites in vocal cords."

Well, that was explanation enough for the voice. Not to mention enough information to send a prickle of discomfort up the Doctor's spine. Being eternally speechless would be a nightmare, let alone having his only escape be a man-shaped metal coffin. "And now?" he asked.

The cyborg shrugged. "Said all I needed to. No need to pointlessly fill the air."

The Doctor frowned. "What about the mask?"

The question was considered for a moment. A small pneumatic hiss was the only warning before the visor split into two angled plates that slid back around the cyborg's 'ears'.

The face was a wreck, if only because half of it was gone. The right 'eye' was simply a bit of black plastic with a few lenses on it surrounded by small support plates while the jaw was completely replaced by a carbon black piece of metal machined in the style of a jawbone. Somehow, the Doctor understood that everything under that point was the same; a metal imitation of long gone anatomy.

The rest was... well, it was human. Mid-toned brown skin speckled with pockmarks and the drawn lines of scars obliterated much chance of putting a proper age on its owner and the remaining eye was a bright, nearly turquoise blue that burned through the Doctor's like a laser beam.

There was some emotion in there, but it was buried under something else. Pride or self-control? Maybe it was both. Or maybe it was just the look of a broken man, a treacherous voice in the back of his head murmured. But whatever it was, it was definitely not of Cyber-make.

"The visor is more… photogenic," the cyborg said, as the visor slipped back together into a smooth plate.

"Yeah, definitely," Mickey agreed.

The Doctor knocked him on the arm.

"What? He said it first," Mickey protested before turning back to the cyborg. "You'll be helping us with the Cybermen?"

"Why else would we be here?" Dei said around a grin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The one thing that I think I really like about having a very powerful character in this fic is that, thanks to her being there, a lot of the really out of nowhere solutions to issues in Series Two (and I think Ten's run in general) that pissed me off in the first place suddenly don't have to happen anymore.
> 
> Using the crystal thing that was only established as a slowly regenerating power source to kill off the Cybermen that had you cornered with beams of concentrated energy that were not even sort of referenced before the moment? Completely avoided. It gives me such a nice warm tingly feeling inside, being able to 'solve' these sorts of pet peeves.
> 
> One could argue that with the wide array of powers our protagonist has, it's not much of an improvement, but considering that I've plotted out most of them before getting to actually writing this story and that I plan on using them in other sections, I don't think it's entirely an asspull in that context.
> 
> How do I know what an electrolarynx is and what they sound like? Because about nine or ten years ago in health class, I made an ass of myself in front of my peers with one and I am very good at remembering shame.
> 
> Malmooth and Charrl – two insectoid alien species from Doctor Who. Chantho from Utopia would be an example of a Malooth, while the Charrl can only be found in two of the expanded universe books (Birthright and Happy Endings) and the audio version of one of those books. Oddly enough, I think the Doctor (Seven for both) barely shows up in either.
> 
> A kuchisake-onna is a Japanese urban legend/ghost story featuring a female spirit wearing a sick mask that comes up to people and asks them if they think she's pretty. If they say no, she kills them, if they say yes, she takes off her mask, revealing that her mouth has been slit ear to ear. She asks them if she's pretty now. If you say no, she guts you. If you say yes, she cuts your face to look like hers. If you say 'I'm sorry, but I'm late to an appointment', she apologizes for disrupting your schedule and lets you go along your way.
> 
> Remember kids, manners can save your life.
> 
> Quite a few Jumps have given Delaine alternate names and identities (while the identity used in Orre Adventures and AITAS are fairly similar and use the same name, the process works a bit like a broken reincarnation cycle, with memories usually carrying over), which I will try to explain whenever they come up. Sometimes it's because they ended up taking over a pre-existing identity, but sometimes it's just based on in-universe naming themes leading to mistranslations.
> 
> Chindi is from the Metal Gear Solid / Metal Gear Rising Jumps. If I do anything with them specifically, and I kind of want to since their personality and story have clicked really well, I'll have to do it after a bunch of MGS Let's Play binging, because I suck at a lot of games.
> 
> Dei is from the Invader Zim Jump. I do have some idea of what I'm going to do with them and it'll probably show up later on its own.
> 
> Red is from the Madoka Jump. Her name in that 'verse is actually Rosenrot, but I wanted to avoid any confusion with Rose in the chapter, plus Red's the casual sort so it's a nickname she uses anyway.


	10. Chapter 10

London was dead.

Not properly, as there were still people in its streets, but the complete absence of motion in them save for the slow forward slog made them little better than zombies. Faces frozen in place, save for the necessary function of breath, they stared into empty space as their feet moved mechanically forward and their ear pods blinked wildly.

"What's wrong with them?" Rose asked.

"Remember earlier, when they froze earlier?" the Doctor asked.

"When they got the update?"

He nodded. "Yes. From Cybus Industries, which belongs to…"

"Lumic," Pete said flatly, "and I'll wager this update isn't nearly as mundane as the forecast and the daily joke."

"Can we just take them out? Disrupt the signal?" Rose asked as Mickey walked backwards in front of some of the nearby victims, apparently trying to appeal to some sort of reflex in one of the hypnotized. Alas, no game of chicken was going to happen here, no matter how much he waved his hands in the other person's face.

"That's one way of putting it," the Doctor said, waving his sonic around a victim's head before checking the readings. Yes, making Pete take out his ear pods had been the right decision, if for the wrong reason. Not that he'd be pointing out that little detail anytime soon. "As for disrupting the signal… it isn't impossible, but without subverting or taking out the main broadcast, the odds of backfiring are too high. And since these ear pods are as close as you can get to a direct transmission to the brain… well, something backfires there, you might as well replace the ol' grey matter with soup. Taking the ear pods out would just do it for sure."

"And soup is bad," Mickey finished, finally giving up on getting any reaction.

"Brain soup, yes. Some other soups, eehh… sorry. Got off topic. But yes, brain soup is definitely bad."

"Doesn't exactly prevent us from cooking up a counter signal in the meantime," Dei said, pulling a mobile phone out of their pocket and beginning to tap out some code. It wasn't anything fancy or particularly unearthly, to the Doctor's mild surprise, though he would have preferred a touch-screen to a QWERTY-keyboard slider himself. Perhaps it was simply more practical for a creature with pointy claws. "It'll take bit, filtering out the chaff data from the usable, but beyond that… shouldn't be particularly difficult, Earth tech and all."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ricky snapped.

"Oh, merely commentary on how I'm a genius from a culture that figured out interstellar travel and conquest before yours figured out standardized spelling."

The Doctor frowned as he mentally calculated the numbers. So… roughly two-hundred years, four-hundred at absolute best. "That's _really_ not that impressive," he said.

"Silence, you… you brown cockatiel!" Dei screeched in an alarmingly shrill voice – had any glass cracked just now? The Doctor almost turned to check –before dropping back into what the Doctor had initially assumed was its natural timber as it resumed typing. "I know what I'm doing."

"Biyooch'idi," Chindi muttered as he walked past, the minute swivel of his head the only indication of the cyborg scanning the area.

Ricky – or was it Mickey? It was impossible to tell the two apart without one speaking – suddenly pressed himself up against a fence column, motioning for the rest of the group to join him. The spiky haired blonde that the Doctor had long since decided was his least favorite member of the group was crouched next to him.

"Come and have a look at this," he whispered as soon as everyone was close enough.

'This' was more of the same as the street they were on, but with the final dismissal of any lingering sensation of safety. Cybermen turned on their heel as one, marching with heavy hydraulic steps alongside the mesmerized mob.

"Perfect," the Doctor murmured before turning to look at Pete Tyler though the corner of his eye, "Pete, does Lumic have a–"

"Battersea," the man interrupted, the dots apparently falling into place far before he'd even finished the question, "It's where Lumic produces most of his prototypes."

"Why's he doing it though? What's the point of all this?" Rose asked.

"He's dying, been dying for years. Everything Lumic's ever done, it's been to keep himself alive. Anything he's put on the market, he made for himself first. Orthotics when he started having difficulty walking. Artificial blood when his marrow stopped producing. Others, to replace organs or keep the existing ones functional," Pete said, never looking away from the Cybermen, "This is just the last step for him, because there's nothing else he can replace. I'd known that he'd been going around ethics standards and even Geneva on this project, but this…"

"Desperate people resort to desperate measures. Lumic has some sort of degenerative disease, I recall, and those are rarely pleasant experiences," Mrs. Moore said, "Multiple system atrophy?"

"Does that really matter?" Mickey cut in, waving at the Cybermen milling around the street, "He's killing people and turning them into robots! Would think that stopping that would take precedence over whatever the bastard's _sick_ with."

Rose was staring straight ahead. "They look a bit familiar, Doctor. The handles…"

"Oh, yes, you saw one in the museum," the Doctor agreed, "Cybermen also. Different model, slightly different history… but oh, so very much the same style."

"What the hell are you two on about?" Pete asked.

Oh, yes, he hadn't explained this yet. Always fun, giving exposition under fire. "Alternate universes. Really quite common."

"In comic books!"

The Doctor gave a-half shrug. "Real life is stranger than fiction… or so I've been told."

Any further banter was curtailed by the sound of metal boots approaching.

"Right," Ricky said as he cast a glance back at an approaching platoon of Cybermen, "Come on, we need to get out of the city. Okay, split up."

"We're two words into this plan and it's already stupid," Chindi muttered.

"Mrs. Moore, you look after that bloke," the head of the Preacher's continued as if the cyborg hadn't spoken, "Jake, distract them. Go right, I'll go left. We'll meet back at Bridge Street. Move."

"And the rest of us are left to split up as we please," Dei said, long metal legs sprouting out of its back to raise the alien even higher above the ground. Oh, now that looked like a fun toy. "Chindi…"

The cyborg heaved a not entirely believable sigh. "You always pick the conspiracy theorists."

"Because they're so much _fun_ ," the alien replied, its long tongue flickering out between its teeth to hiss at the group before it scrambled into the darkness after Mickey as the Doctor, Rose, Pete, Mrs. Moore, and the mysterious Chindi split off in another direction.

* * *

A hundred and fifty three guests at the party and a serving staff of thirty five. Out of that, roughly eighty-seven were dead, five from semi-natural causes, four from jumping out of the upper story windows and landing in the worst kind of way.

I might have marked that as a poor sort of success if my headcount had revealed more than twenty still with me. "Forty missing," I muttered as Red and I shepherded the survivors out into the lawn. Maybe some of the unaccounted for had been those that I'd pointed towards the woods, but that wouldn't account for forty. Ten, twenty at the absolute most if the ones I'd pushed on had grabbed others, but forty was pushing the bounds of credulity.

Forty potential Cybermen. Forty potential unidentified corpses.

"Alright," Red said, bracing her boot against the shattered windshield of a car the Cybermen had ruined. The crowd couldn't help looking at her, even if their first impulse was to look away from the talking corpse in a cape that was demanding their attention. "Mission priority is stopping the Cybermen. The secondary goal was getting all you out of this alive. How we do that is up in the air. Me and Tuxedo Kamen over there –"

Her red hood bobbed as the magical girl nodded at me.

Tuxedo Kamen, really?

"– we've got shit to do and metal motherfuckers to blow up. That's not changing. But you," Red's grin glowed under the moonlight, a slash of shiny teeth set in the dark backdrop of rawhide musculature, "you guys have _options_."

The small crowd shifted uncertainly as she continued, "Option A: you stay here. There's no more Cybermen on the premises, everyone has their earbuds out, so that makes y'all a low priority target."

"But what about –" someone tried to ask.

"Option B," Red continued, ignoring the protest, "you come with us, into London, which is currently overrun with Cybermen, if I'm not mistaken. Tux?"

"It is _absolutely_ overflowing with Cyberrats," I said.

"So yeah. Y'all get to hide out in the sticks or dodge bullets in the city. Pick your poison, ladies, gents, people who work for a living, and do it quick. We're on a tight schedule."

With that, she hopped off of the car to stand next to me while the crowd fell to whispered conversation.

"Having fun, Seiko?" I asked.

Red grinned. Considering the condition of her face, it wasn't much of an indication of her mood. Only a sign that the muscles around her jaw had been pulled in some new direction. "Y'know, I really don't care for that name coming out in English. Everyone puts the emphasis on the wrong _syll_ able. Besides…"

"–'I just call myself 'Dead Red' anyway'," I said along with her, matching her delivery exactly, "We're part of the same mess, Red. Links in the same chain. You've been me, I've been you…"

"– and we'll do it backwards and forwards every which way until all reality comes crashing down on our heads," she finished, "The 'finishing each other's sentences' works both ways, y'know. You wouldn't be so predictable if you just stopped _quoting_ everything."

What's the use of a good quotation if you can't use it? "It's a reflex," I said, fighting down the mangled quote. I wasn't going to do it. Nope.

"Unrepentant fandom trash."

"Hot-blooded gun-happy ham."

Red stuck her tongue out at me from between her teeth, though she quickly retrieved it as one of the party guests – a stately, if inordinately fluffy-haired old man who distinctly reminded me of Jon Pertwee – walked up to us.

"We've elected to stay here," he said, "As you pointed out, there's little reason for the… Cybermen to return. If your mission demands your attentions elsewhere… go about it then. And try to keep from destroying London. Most of us happen to live there."

At this point, I wandered off to find an unoccupied door to access my Warehouse from. While I could easily run the distance, wheels would be more efficient than carrying Red the whole way bridal style.

Once, it had been strange to think that the unassuming key in my hand could open up a pocket dimension, but it was all old hat to me now. There wasn't time for gazes of wonder towards the ceiling – it wasn't properly a ceiling, not if you took the right staircase – or to rummage through old memories. I needed the garage.

The door I needed came right to me and opened with a thought. A perk of being the lord and master of a pocket dimension; absolute convenience at your command.

My eyes passed over my collection of vehicles, picking idly at different details. Too big, too flashy, not particularly fast, overkill… ah. That one. Out of the motorcycle collection; one of the extra special ones that my patron would replace no matter how many times I drove it off of a cliff or abandoned it on the 'bad side' of town. Fast, sturdy, an easy battering ram if things came down to it... yes, that would work nicely.

I mounted it, the engine turning over without protest and the exit to the real world materializing in front of me. My return was to a farewell, apparently all details of the plan hammered out.

"A pleasant evening to you then," she said with a small bow that might have seemed entirely at odds with her appearance if one didn't know where her usual area of operations was, "if our paths do not cross again."

Some of the crowd moved to come towards us, ready to... what? Thank us? Change their minds about us staying? Any way you sliced it, we didn't have time for that.  
"Sorry, must dash," I said as I pulled Red onto the motorcycle and revved the engine.

"You just couldn't resist, could you?" Red asked over the sound of wind as we ate up the miles between us and London.

No, I could not.

* * *

They were hiding behind a clump of dumpsters and garbage bags. There were a dozen places better than this, but humans – and Time Lords, the Doctor added after a mental tic – weren't always the swiftest in times of crisis. Still, they could only hope that the heavy footsteps would pass them by.

No, they were slowing, circling… Wait.

Different universe, different Cybermen… and no experience with the Doctor and his tools.

This could work. He pulled out the sonic screwdriver, flipping through the settings as he tried to access the Cybermen's sensory scanners. Nothing to see here, you have other business to attend to, continue your patrol. Don't delete the incompatible stock right in front of you.

The Cybermen didn't step away immediately, giving the Doctor enough time to regret a handful of things and then… they did, stomping off into the dark.

The entire group exhaled as they stood up.

"How do you think the others are holding up?" Pete asked, "They don't have… whatever that thing is."

"It's a sonic screwdriver," the Doctor said, twirling the tool around in his hand before sliding it back into his pocket, "and they have help, strange though it may be."

Mrs. Moore turned to Chindi. "Can your friend be trusted?" she asked as the party began running down the road again.

"Dei? Oh, we're not friends. Brought together by the hand of some cruel deity, perhaps, and bound by an unbreakable chain thanks to it, but 'friend'… really isn't the word," the cyborg said before tilting his head back towards Mrs. Moore, "But, if your question was if Mickey and Ricky are safe with him, then yes. Dei isn't the type to abandon his allies or those under his protection, despite his many personal failings."

"Aw, such glowing praise, Chindi. I'm touched."

Dei stepped forward from the shadows, the long metal legs that sprouted from the alien's back clicking on the asphalt. Behind him, a possible Mickey walked, while another was slung under the alien's arm like a sack of potatoes which was soon dropped as Dei returned to the ground.

"All idiots accounted for, safe as houses," Dei said before frowning, "Never understood that phrase. Houses aren't that safe. I break into them all the time."

"Consider yourself the exception, not the rule," Mrs. Moore said as she knelt down by the boy on the ground, her hands going to his neck to check for a pulse. "He's alive, but in shock. Shouldn't have expected anything else from the civilian…"

"Actually," the standing doppelganger said, " _I'm_ Mickey."

"Oh."

"Yeah," Dei said, cracking his neck to the side as he shoved his hands into his pockets, "Dicky there got the brilliant idea to split up – again – and got himself cornered by some Cybermen. If I hadn't picked him up and got him over the fence, he would have been a lot crispier than he is now."

Ricky shuddered from where he lay on the asphalt.

"Still, you might want to find a safe place to stow him for a while," the alien added, "He's going to be useless for the rest of the night."

"My… his gran's flat isn't too far from here," Mickey said, pointing down the street, "Shouldn't be much problem to drag him there, make sure she's alright as well."

"I was thinking a dumpster, but I guess that works too."

The Doctor looked down the street as the others busied themselves with the transport of Ricky. How many people were walking to their doom while they dragged Mickey's doppelganger to his grandmother's? How many had familiar faces?

A hand grabbed the sleeve of his tuxedo, dragging the Doctor out of his thoughts. "What's wrong?" Rose asked.

"Nothing."

* * *

Chindi was old. He'd been that way for a long time, though he knew few could tell just from looking at him. He'd lived through four wars, countless conflicts behind the scenes, and more atrocities than he cared to count. Cyborgs, monsters, child soldiers, war economies, robots that could wipe out cities, parasites that could wipe out entire languages. His voice, his name, his body, and his friends had been taken from him one by one, and there were days that he wondered if he should add his mind to the list. He was a soldier, a cyborg, and an inconvenience for many who would style themselves masters of warfare.

He could safely say that he had seen some shit. He wished he could say that what the Cybermen were up to was new.

"You're more talkative than I would have expected."

Chindi turned minutely, identifying the Doctor through the corner of his good eye. One of his pattern had known the story well, though the series had never quite taken off in his universe, and there was no mistaking the Time Lord.

"You're better company than I'm accustomed to," the soldier replied.

"Mmm. And what sort of company is that?"

Chindi gave him a pointed look, one that would be interpreted as such despite the visor being in the way.

"Ah, right," the Doctor said, apparently getting the general idea, if not exactly the right one.

The man… alien would not be aware of Chindi's real relationship with Dei or the others in his pattern, but the fact that there _was_ a relationship of sorts was clear. It was better than going around telling people that not only did he have voices in his head, they also gave him superpowers.

"Will you be alright in there?" the Doctor asked.

Chindi started a little. "What?"  
"Well, this is only guesswork, but I'm assuming that whatever whoever did to you… the Cyberconversion might not be that different a process," the Doctor said, "How much of you is organic? I hate to presume…"

"My brain, a portion of my spine, and my eye. The face is a synthetic recreation."

The Doctor looked thoughtful for a moment. "Mmm. The question still stands then; will you be alright in there? I've seen what they do. It's not pretty."

"I'm well acquainted with ugliness," Chindi said as he turned away to look at the factory. A dark building, save for the red glow of lights turning on and off in patterns. A broadcast function of some sort, drawing in the latest victims. "What's the plan?"

"You weren't listening in? Three approaches; above, between, and below," the Doctor said, "Mrs. Moore and I will be going in through the cooling tunnels – below – to access the primary control panel. Between will be Rose and Pete, infiltrating via the crowds. Above…"

"The zeppelin with the frequency broadcast."

"Yes… are you getting that signal?" he asked.

Chindi tapped the side of his head. "It's not hardwired into my brain like the ear pods, but for radio chatter, it is annoying," the cyborg said before looking over at Dei, "You're on for balloonacy?"

"You know me so well," the Irken said with a grin, "And will you be revisiting your tunnel rat days, Tsela?"

Chindi gritted his teeth at the casual use of the name. It wasn't his anymore. "I'm a little too _shiny_ to be walking in through the front door, aren't I?" he replied, "Unless you think I should put on a cheap wig and tacky scarf before making the attempt, of course."

Dei hissed.

"Alright, enough of that," Mrs. Moore said, "We've got a mission and juvenile sniping isn't part of the parameters. Let's go."

Chindi rolled his eyes, but fell back. She was right; bickering was counterproductive to goals and time was at a premium. He grabbed his sword and fell in behind the Doctor's splinter of the party.

"What did the green fellow mean by 'tunnel rat'?" Mrs. Moore asked as they opened up the access hatch to a cooling tunnel.

"Vietnam," he said as he hopped down the hole, scanning for any threats before waving the others down, "The Cong had underground tunnels since the Second World War and they knew how to use them. Tunnels that were maybe… a fifth the size of this one? Maybe smaller, the memory cheats. So they'd get small guys like me – the tunnel rats –, give us a pistol, a bayonet, a flashlight, and a wave before sending us down to clear them out and plant the explosives."

"Sounds positively delightful," Mrs. Moore said as she looked around, shivering, "It's damned cold down here. I imagine that wasn't the problem for you, was it?"

Involuntarily, his mind was transported back. Crawling through the jungle, the absence of noise sending a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the weather. Dark tented ways, stiflingly sticky hot and choked with the stench of decay, threatening to make him – "No," Chindi answered, forcing the memory down. He had things to do here and now, "Cold wasn't the problem."

"Hn. Can't see a thing," the woman said as she shuffled around the inside of her bag, "Thankfully, I have headlamps." She passed one to the Doctor before holding on out to the cyborg, who waved it off.

"I have night vision and thermal," he explained, turning the settings on. There wasn't much to see, really. The Cybermen didn't have organic parts to produce heat, everything was chilled do to the tunnel's function... except for the latest fleshy intruders, who glowed like torches.

Their footsteps splashed in shallow puddles, echoing through the tunnel. How good was a Cyberman's hearing, Chindi wondered as they went deeper and deeper. How much of the element of surprise would they have left by the time they accessed the factory proper?

"You wouldn't happen to have a hotdog or something of the like in there, would you Mrs. Moore? Breaking and entering makes me slightly peckish."

"Of course you would ask for the mechanically recovered meat," Mrs. Moore said around a laugh.

"I know," the Doctor said, "It's the Cyberman of food, but it's tasty."

"I don't have a hotdog, but I have a couple curry MRE's," Chindi said.

"I'm peckish, not desperate."

Fair enou– Chindi stopped short, quickly signaling for the others to stop. Cybermen lined the walls, staring blankly ahead. There was no clear end to the row, the shining bodies following the wall as far as the cyborg's enhanced eye could see.

"Converted and put on ice," the Doctor explained, reaching out to trace the eyehole of the nearest Cyberman's face, "Not a danger to us yet, unless there's a trip switch down here. We'll have to progress carefully. Chindi –"

"Old hat for the old rat," the cyborg murmured as he slowly lowered his hand to the hilt of his sword. He wouldn't mind some backup just about now.

* * *

The motorcycle rumbled with a sort of grim satisfaction as Red and Delaine entered London proper. A Cyberman turning to look at it fell backwards, a sizzling hole through its metal face. The rest in its line fell similarly, all of them to various kill shots.

If they counted as such on creatures without organs or blood, of course.

"You got a lock on our target?" Red asked as she threw the rifle away, allowing the spent weapon to dissolve back into loose magic. She could turn it back into a new one – in fact, she just did –, but there was always a sunk cost in the process. Negligible, for the most part, but with the brute force she employed, it added up. Part of using her particular brand, she supposed. Nothing came for free, much less power.

"Yep," Delaine said, "Battersea."

"Fittin'," Red said as she closed her eyes, letting the wind and her cloak whip around her as she began to hum and eventually segue into song. "Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away… Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air…"

"Pink Floyd?"

"You're not one of the musical ones, I suddenly remember," Red said.

"I like music," Delaine replied, "I'm just not the greatest at making it."

"Hey, nobody's payin' to hear _my_ voice either, but that doesn't hold me back," the magical girl shot back, "Y'just gotta find some pleasure in life, D, and not give two shits about what people think of ya doing exactly that."

"Heh. Easy to say, harder to do. You know how I am about rejection. Plus, your idea of fun is scaring the shit out of people," the masked girl said as she slowed down. Just down the way was the factory, silver bodies gleaming as they marched around. "Your stop."

"Hey, you gotta work with what you have, and what I have is a scary face." Red jumped off the back of the bike landing primly on the ground, twisting around to give her other a flippant salute. "Catch ya on the flipside."

Delaine nodded, revving up the bike again before driving off into the dark. The magical girl watched for a moment before turning to look at the factory.

Her rictus grin widened and she accelerated.

"I've looked over Jordan and I have seen! Things are not what they seem!"

She wasn't as fast as she would like to be and had been before, possessed of the speed of lightning, but considering how lethargic the Cybermen were in comparison to even a normal human, she might as well have been traveling at light speed as she ran through the factory.

"What do you get for pretending the danger's not real?"

Occasionally, she'd run into a group of humans, but they weren't in any state to notice the lich in a frilly skirt running along the ceilings. Maybe the blonde that had flinched did though. Heh, Red would have to remember that.

"Meek and obedient you follow the leader, down well-trodden corridors into the valley of steel!"

Aye, and that's what she was doing now, going further down into the factory, down twisting staircases and halls brimming with lights and wires. Down, down, and down, destroying Cybermen as she went.

She grinned as she saw something that wasn't a Cyberman. A black tuxedo and spiked hair leaning over a fallen Cyberman with its chest cavity pulled open, mechanical and semi-organic guts pulled out. Beside him, a woman crouched, watching the Time Lord's hands at work, while behind them…

Well, Red was always for a big entrance in the name of life-saving.

"What a surprise!"

The Doctor looked up, right as she rested her rifle on his shoulder and fired. The Cyberman that had been sneaking up behind them was down, but that was immaterial because he had seen her, could not miss her face at this distance of less than a foot away.

"A look of terminal shock in your eyes," Red breathed around her teeth, her eyes wide as she stared into the Doctor's own terrified gaze, "Now things are really what they seem."

The Doctor swallowed, unable to tear his gaze away. "No. You…"

Red finally broke the stare, adjusting her aim to take down another Cyberman approaching down the hall. "I'm just fucking with ya," she said as the robot fell backwards to the floor, a cherry red circle in the middle of its forehead. She turned around, letting her rifle fall over her shoulder. "You misplace your ninja blender?" she asked.

"Uh…"

"If you are referring to Chindi, he got left behind in the tunnels, giving us time to escape the Cybermen," the woman said, "But I do not believe he mentioned you, Mister…?"

Red grinned, ignoring the unintentional misgender. "Seiko."

"And that's not foreboding at all," the Doctor muttered, "What are you doing here?"

"Mmm. Breaking, entering, inconveniencing, reckless discharge of a firearm…" she lowered the barrel and fired again, taking down another Cyberman that had been approaching from the back, "Oh, there's going to be a real list by the time we're done here."

The Doctor stared, apparently getting his first look at her clothes under her cloak. It wasn't like her costume was obscene or anything. Wholly unsuited for a girl with maybe twelve percent of a face… maybe.

"I'm really not who you seem to think I am, sweetie," Red said, stepping far enough to the side to let the pair pass, "Now, if you care to move to other areas of the building, I'm sure you'll figure out how your tongue works before breakfast."

* * *

Not the Master, not the Master…

The Doctor shuddered internally as he followed the walking corpse in a mullet skirt and petticoat through the factory. No, he didn't really want the image of his oldest nemesis in a dress. Or any kind of revealing clothing, actually.

Not that he was going to be able to avoid the mental picture now, but at least it was one that thankfully wouldn't be followed up by the actual Master showing up in a bustle…well, now that he had the thought, it was probably going to happen.

He flinched as 'Seiko' fired her strange gun again, putting a hole through a Cyberman's 'heart' without a sign of protest. A powerful energy weapon of some sort, dressed up as an ornate Earth antique firearm. Effective, the Doctor would be the first to admit, but offensive by its very nature.

Their path led past what the Doctor could only assume was the conversion floor, but whatever it had been, it wasn't going to be for much longer.

Cybermen, or chunks thereof, were scattered across the floor, and the chambers themselves were shredded, electrical sparks spilling from cut wires like water. Across the room, the destruction was still in progress, a barely perceptible humanoid spinning around, sword in hand.

Chindi.

Metal screeched as it was torn to pieces, each diving blade reduced to nothing more than a twisted, twitching stump, still going through the motions of a process it would never again be able to complete.

That didn't stop the whirlwind of destruction from cutting every component of the Cyberconverter to scrap. Lines of glowing metal where the high frequency blade had sliced through glowed red against the sterile grey and blued lighting of the factory, only fading after the storm had moved on to other areas.

"Chindi!" the Doctor yelled.

The cyborg stilled, head swiveling to face the Doctor. Against the cloud of steam and sparks, any humanity that he'd seen in the man earlier seemed absent, leaving only an avatar of destruction in his wake.

"If you want to stop this, you need to help us stop the signal!"

A Cyberman had approached behind Chindi, only to be removed of its head with barely a gesture. Before the Doctor could yell again, the cyborg had bridge the gap between them.

"I need to destroy it all, so nobody gets the idea to do this to anyone else again," he whispered.

The Doctor swallowed. So it hadn't been a choice for him. "Destroy the primary control, and none of this equipment will ever run again. I promise," he said.

The cyborg turned his head minutely. "I think they've captured Pete Tyler and Rose. I didn't see them anywhere in the lines."

"What about Jackie?"

Chindi turned to look at him directly. The silence spoke volumes before the Doctor looked away. The alternate Jackie was dead. It shouldn't have meant anything, but it still stung. Another corpse with a familiar name attached.

"Alright. That just leaves Lumic then," he said.

"If you want to go with the Doctor, I don't mind doing a little pest control," Seiko said, resting her rifle over her shoulders. She rolled her eyes as the Doctor looked at her, "Don't think I've missed the way you react to me. I make you uncomfortable. I might as well go and freak out someone who deserves it."

"They didn't have a choice."

"Neither did my usual prey," she said seriously before she disappeared into the smoke, the clatter of heeled boots quickly fading away.

What she'd meant by that, the Doctor didn't know. And he didn't want to know either. "Come on!" he yelled, pulling Chindi towards the staircase. "We've got people to save."

Two flights later, he found the control room… and the Cybercontroller.

Somehow the Doctor wasn't surprised by Lumic's upgrade. The man had been halfway to being a Cyberman before; it was mostly just a matter of putting him in silver plating after that. That didn't mean he didn't keep an eye on Lumic as he walked over to Pete and Rose. It wasn't like the Cyberman was going anywhere, bolted into his metal throne as he was.

"Are you two alright?"

"My wife's soulless robot, we're under threat of death, and Lumic has factories like this one every inhabited continent," Pete replied, "Based on that, take a guess."

"Identify yourself," the Cybercontroller yelled.

The Doctor ignored him. "Rose, are you –"

The blonde wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I'm fine, all things considering."

"You didn't see D –?" he asked, his question trailing off as Rose shook her head. It had been a long shot, hoping that the other girl had somehow survived the mansion.

"IDENTIFY YOURSELF," the Cybercontroller screamed again.

"I am the Doctor and you, Mr. Lumic, are the person responsible for killing one of my companions!" the Doctor yelled back, spinning around to point at the chair-bound cyborg, "Taking that and everything else you've done into account, do you really want to be on the receiving end of my attention? Because while there's no question about me ending your scheme, there's always the question of how thoroughly I can destroy you."

The Cybercontroller seemed slightly taken aback by that, but any shock soon disintegrated into panic as hell broke loose as the regular Cybermen started twitching. One simply fell over, while the others settled for screaming. Somewhere in the bowels of the factory, explosions began to ring out, shaking the very foundations.

"That would be the _other_ infiltration team destroying both your ear pod control system and the emotional inhibiter," the Doctor said as more explosions rattled the building.

How many Cybermen had picked the most vicious forms of suicide available to them just now?

The Lumic Cyberman seemed to vibrate with rage on his shining throne. "You – you _meddler_. This could have been a world without pain or loss!"

"A metal world full of metal people with metal thoughts and metal feelings," the Doctor snapped back, "Oh, I'm sorry; you don't believe in feelings. Not even consent. That's why you had to use mind control and manipulation to get people to come here to this… hack shop cum _graveyard_. Because the only thing that matters to you is that everyone is the same, all fitting in to cookie cutter shapes, without imagination or individuality. Oh, yes, I can see why nobody would volunteer for your little 'upgrade'."

The Cybercontroller reached up to pull at his cords. "I will destroy you myself!" Lumic roared, only to stop as his hand fell off.

Chindi stood nearby, sword in hand. "You will destroy nothing!" the cyborg snarled before sweeping the blade around to remove Lumic's head, leaving nothing but a glowing stump in its place. "Now, run!"

* * *

The Doctor walked into the TARDIS, navigating the console room by memory in the gloom. His oldest and best companion. He caressed her console before sliding open a hatch, where a small inset sat.

He pulled the artron crystal out of his pocket, the green pulsing glow almost bright enough to light up the room. Fully charged and ready to slip the TARDIS back through the cracks to her proper universe… if they could time it just right. It wouldn't be particularly difficult; Time Lords and timing went hand in hand.

It popped right into place and there was a reassuring hum as the lights turned on, first a dull glow but quickly powering up to full brightness.

The Doctor grinned. "There you are, old girl."

There was a knock on the TARDIS door. Rose never knocked, so that left it to… Mickey or someone else? He walked over, pulling the door open to reveal one brunette, slightly singed and devoid of footwear.

Delaine gave him a hesitant smile. "Hi?"

The Doctor couldn't hold himself back from grabbing the girl into a tight hug and burying his nose in her hair. Yes, definitely real, definitely alive, possessed of a heartbeat and pulse and all the other things that kept humans ticking like well-oiled clocks.

Not another Adric. Not another Peri.

"Y'r squishin' me," Delaine mumbled into his chest.

The Doctor pushed her back, maybe keeping his hands on her shoulders a little bit longer than strictly necessary before brushing some imaginary dust off of them and letting his hands fall back down to his pockets. "Right. Sorry."

She looked up at him through messed hair and abruptly blew a strand out of the way. Oh she did look awful, with grease smears on her face and the smell of smoke positively oozing off of her. "You all right?" she asked.

"Perfectly," he lied as he shoved the worry out of his mind.

Delaine didn't look wholly convinced by that, but anything she might have said was cut off by Rose's return.

"He just… he just ran off – eh?" Rose cut off as she processed the sight before her. "Aren't you –"

"I'm _fairly_ certain that I'm not dead," Delaine said dryly, "Just a hunch, though. Who knows, I might be wrong."  
"Where are your shoes?"

Delaine looked down. "I don't even know."

The Doctor looked away from the pair as Mickey stuck his head through the door. "Hey, Mickey, you ready to go?"

The boy gnawed his lip. "Uh, no. I'm staying."

"You're what?"

"You can't," Rose cried.

"I'm staying," Mickey said, "I think I can do some good here and the Preachers can use my skills. Plus I promised my gran that I'd fix her rug."

"What about me? What if I need you?" the blonde girl asked.

Mickey swallowed, looking away from her, "No, you don't, Rose. You have him. Maybe we had something once, but that was a long time ago."

"Well, we'll come back," she said, nodding, "We can travel anywhere. Come and see you, yeah?"

"You can't. The Doctor explained it to me," he said, "You can't travel between parallel universes. 's too dangerous."

"We only got here by accident," the Doctor said, "Either a crack or some other anomaly. When we leave, I have to close it. Otherwise, it stands the chance of growing out of control and doing some real damage."

Mickey nodded. "See? You've got things to do, I've got things to do, helping with stopping the Cybermen and all that. The alien guy, Dei… he gave me his phone with the codes."

The Doctor frowned. "He's not going to help?"

"I think he said something about running rampant for a few days and then 'leaving us clean up the smoldering wreckage of our planet'," Mickey said.

"Ah." Yes, that was usually considered 'bad'. "Least you saw a bit," the Doctor said, "Aliens, robots. The future. Pre-revolutionary France."

Mickey shook his head. "Yeah, we had a laugh. But go on. Wouldn't want you lot to lose the TARDIS on account of long goodbyes. Go on."

"I suppose the words I'm looking for are 'good luck', then," the Doctor decided.

"Guess it is," Mickey agreed, "Goodbye. And thanks." With that, he ducked out, shutting the TARDIS door in time for the systems to start humming louder. The time to escape.

The Doctor ran over to the console, pulling switches. "Hold on, this is not going to be a smooth trip," he warned before throwing the final lever. The TARDIS shuddered as it dematerialized and the shudder intensified until the entire console room seemed ready to vibrate to pieces.

Then, suddenly, the flight smoothed out before clunking to a halt. The Doctor smiled as he went over to the door and opened it.

"You're back," Jackie Tyler said happily. Ah, so he'd landed in the living room, like he wanted. "You have a nice trip?"

"Oh, kind of scary in bits, but it all turned out alright," the Doctor said even as Rose rushed past him to hug her mother.

"You're alive," Rose whimpered into her mother's shoulder.  
"Of course I am – what did you do?" Jackie asked, looking over the Doctor's shoulder into the TARDIS's interior, "Where's Mickey?"

Delaine stepped forward, leaning against the door frame, "Uh, hi," she said with a weak wave.  
"And who's that one?"

This was going to be a fun explanation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm working on stuff for a 'character bible' of sorts to post on AO3. This will take some time for both the art and the research, but hopefully it will be worth it.
> 
> Anyway, I'm working on some original chapters, so update times might take a little longer in the future, especially since I'm kind of jumping around as different muses punch me.
> 
> One is picking up on a thread that I dropped the last time we saw Sarah Jane, another is mostly an excuse to have a Multi-Doctor chapter before getting through Martha Jones's era (I've got some stuff already scribbled out for Time Crash and a couple concrete plans for Journey's End, that's how out of order I operate here). Maybe I'll do another dedicated to catching up with Harriet Jones (possibly while working with a rather subtle thread that I dropped back in chapter one).
> 
> One of the reasons why this chapter took so long to update (besides depression, other obligations, and general executive dysfunction) was that one of the original ones just kept distracting me. JUST A HEADS UP.


	11. Chapter 11

**Sorry to make you think this was an update, but I just wanted the readers to know that Chains Adventurous Adventures In Time And Space is currently under rewrite with the aid of a beta-reader.**

**The story will be longer with longer chapters, but it will be some time before it 'catches up' to the original, so this one will remain up until that time. Thank you for your patience.**


	12. Further Updates On The Rewrite

The Rewrite is now up, under the same series of this one. While Chains Adventurous - Dimensions In Time is not fully caught up with this version, I thought that it would be fair to anyone still following this version of the story to know so they can follow the other if they are still interested.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so you might have noticed that this shares a designation with another story I have. That isn't coincidence, seeing as this one takes place in the somewhat distant future of the story that Orre Adventures begins.
> 
> I just happened to decide to divide my attention between the fics (and maybe sections of other parts) because my fandom interest shifts. Some references to past events in this fic might appear later or not appear at all (all depending on if I can squeeze a good story out of them). Heck, I might even do a 'scrapbook' fic of all the one-shots that can't be stretched into full fics.
> 
> Comments and criticism are welcome, as always.


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